Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet by Derrick Jensen

Notes:	Hide Notes

Slide 2: DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE Strategy to Save the Planet Aric McBay, Uerre Keith, and Derrick Jensen Seven Stories Press IO I'IlIIl Slide 3: Copyright © 2 0 1 1 by the authors A Seven Stories Press First Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted in any form or by any means. including mechanical. elec tric. photocopying. recording. or otherwise. without the prior written permission of the publisher. Seven Stories Press 140 Watts Street www.sevenstories.com New York. NY 10013 College prof essors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order. visit http://www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226.1411. Book design by Jon Gilbert Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data M cBay. Aric. Deep green resistance : strategy to save the planet / Aric McBay. Lierre Keith. and Derrick Jensen. p. em. Includes bibliographical ref erences. ISBN 978-1-58322-929-3 (pbk.) I. Environmentalism. 2. Sustainable living. 3. Global environmental change. I . Keith. Lierre. II. Jensen. Derrick. 1 960- I I I . Title. G E 1 95·M385 20II 333.72--dc22 20II007287 Printed in the United States I Slide 4: Contents Authors' Note Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . ........ . ...... .. 9 by Derrick Jensen ............................................................ 11 Part I: Resistance I. The Problem 3. Liberals and Radicals 2. Civilization and Other Hazards by Anc McBay .................. 31 by Lierre Keith ................................................. 21 4. Culture of Resistance by Lierre by Lierre Keith.................................... 61 Keith ..................................113 5. Other Plans by Lierre Keith ................................................. 193 6. A Taxonomy of Action by Anc McBay .............................. 239 Part II: Organization 7. The Psychology of Resistance by Anc McBay ..................279 by Anc McBay ..........................291 9. Decision Making by Anc McBay ...........................· .......·.··307 10. Recruitment by Anc McBay ··············································313 II. Security by Anc McBay .....................................................329 Part I II: Strategy and Tactics 8. Organizational Structure 12. Introduction to Strategy by Anc McBay ........................... 345 13. Tactics and Targets 14. Decisive Ecological Warfare Part IV: The Future by Anc McBay.................................... 391 by Anc McBay ....................425 15. Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith ..........................................477 . Epilogue: Getting Started .................................... .....................517 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .......... . . . Bibliography . ... .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 521 .................. .. 539 . .. .. Slide 5: Figures 3-1: Horizontal Hostility ................ 6-1: A Taxonomy of Action ................................................................. ............................................. 85 243 Organizational Network Types 8-1: Individuals ..............................................................................294 8-2: Affinity Groups .......................................................................295 8-3= Networks ................................................................................. 296 8-4: Hierarchy ................................................................................297 8-5: Underground Network/Aboveground Movement ....................300 13-1: Aboveground Operations ...........................................................393 13-2: Underground Operations ..........................................................394 13-3: Just vs. Strategic .........................................................................407 13-4: Just vs. Strategic (annotated) ....................................................408 I Slide 6: I found it was better to fight, always, no matter what. -Andrea Dworkin Slide 7: ' AUTHORS NOTE Before we started writing this book, the three authors-Aric, Uerre, and Derrick-decided to divide the material we wanted to cover among ourselves, so that every chapter would have one main author. The "I" in each chapter ref ers to the person responsible for writing it. The chap ters conclude with Derrick's answers to questions he is frequently asked on the subject of resistance. Slide 8: Preface by Derrick Jensen believed by many others. They just do not dare express themselves as we did. -Sophie Scholl, The White Rose Society Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture--civilization is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about lif on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this cul e ture from destroying every living being. By now we all know the statistics and trends: 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone, there is ten times as much plastic as phy toplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed, amphibian populations are collapsing, migratory songbird populations are collapsing, mollusk populations are collapsing, fish populations are collapsing, and so on. Two hundred species are driven extinct each and every day. If we don't know those statistics and trends, we should. This culture destroys landbases. That's what it does. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing that comes to mind cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground? One of the first written myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh def oresting the hills and valleys of Iraq to build a great city. The Arabian Peninsula used to be oak savannah. The Near East was heavily forested (we've all heard of the cedars of Lebanon). Greece was heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested. We'll say it again: this culture destroys landbases. And it won't stop doing so because we ask nicely. We don't live in a democracy. And before you gasp at this blasphemy, ask yourself: Do governments better serve corporations or living beings? Does the judicial system hold CEOs accountable for their destructive, often murderous acts? Here are a couple of riddles that aren't very funny-Q: What do you 11 Slide 9: 12 Preface get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun? A: Two life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. Q: What do you get when you cross two nation-states, a large corporation, forty tons of poison, and at least 8,000 dead human beings? A: Retirement, with full pay and benefits (Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide, which caused the mass murder at Bhopal). Do the rich f ace the same judicial system as you or I? Does life on earth have as much standing in a court as does a corporation? We all know the answers to these questions. And we know in our bones, if not our heads, that this culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sus tainable way of living. We-Aric, Lierre, and J?errick-have asked thousands upon thousands of people from all walks of life, from activists to students to people we meet on buses and planes, whether they believe this culture will undergo that voluntary transformation. Almost no one ever says yes. If you care about life on this planet, and if you believe this culture won't voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your methods of resistance? Most people don't know, because most people don't talk about it. This book talks about it: this book is about that shift in strategy, and tactics. This book is about fighting back. We must put our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on this planet. We must start to fight back. Those who come after, who inherit whatever's left of the world once this culture has been stopped-whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological col lapse, or the efforts of brave women and men resisting in all�nce with the natural world-are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind. They're not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They're not going to care how hard we tried. They're not going to care whether we were nice people. They're not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They're not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They're not going to care whether we were enlightened or not. They're not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act (e.g., "I'm too stressed to think about Slide 10: Preface 13 it," or " It's too big and scary," or " I'm too busy," or " But those in power will kill us if we effectively act against them," or " If we fight back, we run the risk of becoming like they are," or " But I recycled," or any of a thousand other excuses we've all heard too many times). They're not going to care how simply we lived. They're not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They're not going to care if we became the change we wished to see. They're not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They're to care whether we had "compassion" for the CEOs and politicians run ning this deathly economy. water. We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, but if the people (including the nonhuman people) can't breathe, it doesn't matter. They're going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They're not going Every new study reveals that global warming is happening far more quickly than was previously anticipated. Staid scientists are now sug gesting the real possibility of billions of human beings being killed off by what some are calling a Climate Holocaust. A recently released study suggests an increase in temperatures of 16°C (30°F) by the year 2100. We are not talking about this culture killing humans, and indeed the planet, sometime in the far-distant future. This is the future that chil dren born today will see, and suffer, in their lifetimes. Honestly, is this culture worth more than the lives of your own chil dren? In The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton explored how it was that men who had taken the Hippocratic Oath could lend their skills to concen tration camps where inmates were worked to death or killed in assembly lines. He f ound that many of the doctors honestly cared for their charges, and did everything within their power-which means Slide 11: 14 Preface pathetically little-to make life better for the inmates. If an inmate got sick, they might give the inmate an aspirin to lick. They might put the inmate to bed for a day or two (but not for too long or the inmate might be "selected" for murder). If the patient had a contagious disease, they might kill the patient to keep the disease from spreading. All of this made sense within the confines of Auschwitz. The doctors, once again, did everything they could to help the inmates, except for the most important thing of all: They never questioned the existence of Auschwitz itself. They never questioned working the inmates to death. They never questioned starving them to death. They never questioned imprisoning them. They never questioned torturing them. They never questioned the existence of a culture that would lead to these atrocities. They never questioned the logic that leads inevitably to the electrified fences, the gas chambers, the bullets in the brain. We as environmentalists do the same. We fight as hard as we can to protect the places we love, using the tools of the system the best that we can. Yet we do not do the most important thing of all: We do not question the existence of this deathly culture. We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clear-cuts, mur dered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed rivers, poisoned aquifers. And we certainly don't act to stop these horrors. How do you stop global warming that is caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas? If you ask any reasonably intelligent seven year-old, that child should be able to give you the obvious answer. But if you ask any reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old who works for a green high-tech consulting corporation, you'll probably r.eceive an answer that helps the corporation more than the real, physical world. When most people in this culture ask, "How can we stop global warming?" they aren't really asking what they pretend they're asking. They are instead asking, "How can we stop global warming without stopping the burning of oil and gas, without stopping the industrial infrastructure, without stopping this omnicidal system?" The answer: you can't. Here's yet another way to look at it: What would you do if space Slide 12: Preface 15 aliens had invaded this planet, and they were vacuuming the oceans, and scalping native forests, and putting dams on every river, and changing the climate, and putting dioxin and dozens of other carcino gens into every mother's breast milk, and into the flesh of your children, lover, mother, father, brother, sister, friends, into your own flesh? Would you resist? If there existed a resistance movement, would you join it? If not, why not? How much worse would the damage have to get before you would stop those who were killing the planet, killing those you love, killing you? Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are already gone. Where is your threshold for resistance? Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they had killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99? How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then? By asking these questions we are in no way implying that people should not try to work within the system to slow this culture's destruc tiveness. Right now a large energy corporation, state and federal governments, local Indian nations, and various interest groups (f rom environmental organizations to fishermen to f armers) are negotiating to remove five dams on the Klamath River within the next fifteen years (whether salmon will survive that long is dubious). That's something. That's important. But there are 2 million dams in the United States alone; 60,000 of those dams are taller than thirteen feet, and 70,000 are taller than six feet. If we only took out one of those 70,000 dams per day, it would take us 200 years. Salmon don't have that time. Sturgeon don't have that time. If salmon could take on human manif estation, what would they do? This book is about fighting back. And what do we mean by fighting back? As we'll explore in this book, it means first and foremost thinking and feeling for ourselves, finding who and what we love, and figuring out how best to def end our beloved, using the means that are appropriate and necessary. The strategy of Deep Green Resistance (DGR) starts by acknowledging the dire circumstances that industrial civilization has created for life on this planet. The goal of DG R is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. It Slide 13: 16 Preface also means defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human com munities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking, but it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped. IS1 lSI lSI People routinely approach each of this book's authors-Aric, Lierre, and Derrick-and tell us how their hope and despair have merged into one. They no longer want to do everything they can to protect the places they love, everything, that is, except the most important thing of all: to bring down the culture itself. They want to go on the offensive. They want to stop this culture in its tracks. But they don't know how. This book is about creating a culture of resistance. And it's about creating an actual resistance. It's about creating the conditions for salmon to be able to return, for songbirds to be able to return, for amphibians to be able to return. This book is about fighting back. And this book is about winning. lSI lSI lSI Direct actions against strategic infrastructure is a basic tactic of both militaries and insurgents the world over for the simple reason that it works. But such actions alone are never a sufficient strategy for achieving a just outcome. This means that any strategy aiming for a just future must include a call to build direct democracies based on human rights and sustainable material cultures. The different branches of these resistance movements must work in taruiem: the a,boveground and belowground, the militants and the nonviolent, the frontline activists and the cultural workers. We need it all. And we need courage. The word "courage" comes from the same root as coeur, the French word for heart. We need all the courage of which the human heart is capable, f orged into both weapon and shield to defend what is left of this planet. And the lifeblood of courage is, of course, love. So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book Slide 14: Preface 17 about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made oflove. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail? Slide 15: PART I: RESISTANCE Slide 16: (}Japtlr 1 The Problem by Lierre Keith You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral lif if you're not e willing to open your eyes and see the world more dearly. See some of the injustice that's going on. Try to make yourself aware of what's happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act. -Bill Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On energy reserves less than a small bag of M& M's and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she flies thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. Every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins. A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her energy reserves are meant to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, when she will give up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species' f uture. But in some areas, the female's weight before hibernation has already dropped from 650 to 507 pounds. I Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably open, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her. The Aldabra snail should weigh something, but all that's left to weigh are skeletons, bits of orange and indigo shells. The snail has been declared not just extinct, but the first casualty of global warming. In dry periods, the snail hibernated. The young of any species are always more vulnerable, as they have no reserves from which to draw. In this case, the adults' "reproductive success" was a "complete f ailure.'" In plain terms, the babies died and kept dying, and a species millions of years old is now a pile of shell fragments. What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day) That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their 21 Slide 17: 22 Part I: Resistance passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news. There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We've all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong? There are voices raised in concern, even anguish, at the plight of the earth, the rending of its species. "Only zero emissions can prevent a warmer planet," one pair of climatologists declare.4 James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, states bluntly that global warming has passed the tipping point, carbon offsetting is a joke, and "individual lifestyle adjustments" are "a deluded fantasy."5 It's all true, and self-evi dent. "Simple living" should start with simple observation: if burning fossil fuels will kill the planet, then stop burning them. But that conclusion, in all its stark clarity, is not the popular one to draw. The moment policy makers and environmental groups start offering solutions is the exact moment when they stop telling the truth, inconvenient or otherwise. Google "global warming solutions." The first paid sponsor, Campaign Earth, urges "No doom and gloom!! When was the last time depression got you really motivated? We're here to inspire realistic action steps and stories of success." By "realistic" they don't mean solutions that actually match the scale of the problem. They mean the usual consumer choices--cloth shopping bags, travel mugs, and misguided dietary advice-which will do exactly nothing to disrupt the troika of industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy that is skin ning the planet alive. As Derrick has pointed out elsewh�re, even if only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent.6 Aric tells a stark truth: even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average American's annual one ton of garbage production, "your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste."7 Industrialism itself is what has to stop. There is no kinder, every American took every single action suggested by Al Gore it would Slide 18: The Problem 23 greener version that will do the trick of leaving us a living planet. In blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communi ties of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones. Could it be done more "efficiently"? Sure, we could use a little less fossil fuels, but it still ends in the same wastelands of land, water, and sky. We could stretch this endgame out another twenty years, but the planet still dies. Trace every industrial artifact back to its source which isn't hard, as they all leave trails of blood-and you find the same devastation: mining, clear-cuts, dams, agriculture. And now tar sands, mountaintop removal, wind farms (which might better be called dead bird and bat farms). No amount of renewables is going to make up f or the fossil fuels or change the nature of the extraction, both of which are prerequisites for this way of lif Neither fossil fuels nor extracted e. substances will ever be sustainable; by definition, they will run out. Bringing a cloth shopping bag to the store, even if you walk there in your Global Warming Flip-Flops, will not stop the tar sands. But since these actions also won't disrupt anyone's life, they're declared both real istic and successful. The next site's Take Action page includes the usual: buying light bulbs, inflating tires, filling dishwashers, shortening showers, and rearranging the deck chairs. It also offers the ever-crucial Global Warming Bracelets and, more importantly, Flip-Flops. Polar bears everywhere are weeping with relief. The first noncommercial site is the Union of Concerned Scientists. As one might expect, there are no exclamation points, but instead a statement that "[t]he burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) alone counts for about 75 percent of annual C02 emissions." This is followed by a list of Five Sensible Steps. Step One? No, not stop burning fossil fuels-" Make Better Cars and S UVs." Never mind that the automobile itself is the pollution, with its demands-for space, for speed, for fuel-in complete opposition to the needs of both a viable human community and a living planet. Like all the others, the scien tists refuse to call industrial civilization into question. We can have a living planet and the consumption that's killing the planet, can't we? The principle here is very simple. As Derrick has written, "[Alny social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by defi- Slide 19: 24 Part I: Resistance nition unsustainable." 8 Just to be clear, nonrenewable means it will eventually run out. Once you've grasped that intellectual complexity, you use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable." Trees are renew able. But if we use them faster than they can grow, the f orest will turn to desert. Which is precisely what civilization has been doing for its 10,000 year campaign, running through soil, rivers, and f orests as well as metal, coal. and oil. Now the oceans are almost dead and their plankton populations are collapsing, populations that both feed the lif e can move on to the next level. "Any culture based on the nonrenewable of the oceans and create oxygen f the planet. What will we fill our or lungs with when they are gone? The plastics with which industrial civ ilization is replacing them? In parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 48 to 1.9 Imagine if it were your blood, your heart, crammed with toxic materials-not just chemicals, but physical gunk-until there was ten times more of it than you. What metaphor is adequate f the dying plankton? Cancer? Suffocation? Crucifixion? or But the oceans don't need our metaphors. They need action. They need industrial civilization to stop destroying and devouring. In other words, they need us to make it stop. Which is why we are writing this book. lSI lSI lSI Most people, or at least most people with a beating heart, have already done the math, added up the arrogance, sadism, stupidity, and denial, and reached the bottom line: a dead planet. Some of us carry that final sum like the weight of a corpse. For others, that conclusion turns the heart to a smoldering coal. But despair and rage have beep declared unevolved and unclean, beneath the "spiritual warriors" who insist they will save the planet by "healing" themselves. How this activity will stop the release of carbon and the felling of forests is never actually explained. The answer lies vaguely between being the change we wish to see and a 100th monkey of hope, a monkey that is frankly more Christmas pony than actual possibility. Given that the culture of America is f ounded on individualism and awash in privilege, it's no surprise that narcissism is the end result. Slide 20: The Problem 25 The social upheavals of the '60S split along fault lines of responsibility and hedonism, of justice and selfishness, of sacrifice and entitlement. What we are left with is an alternative culture, a small, separate world of the converted, content to coexist alongside a virulent mainstream. Here, one can find workshops on "scarcity consciousness," as if poverty were a state of mind and not a structural support of capitalism. This culture leaves us ill-prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open-hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux children, requires an adult f ortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Mean while, I have been to workshops where global warming was treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one there but me saw a problem with that. The word sustainable-the " Praise, Jesus!" of the eco-earnest-serves as an example of the worst tendencies of the alternative culture. It's a word that perfectly meshes corporate marketers' carefully calculated upswell of green sentiment with the relentless denial of the privileged. It's a word I can barely stand to use because it has been so exsan guinated by cheerleaders for a technotopic, consumer kingdom come. To doubt the vague promise now firmly embedded in the word-that we can have our cars, our corporations, our consumption, and our planet, too-is both treason and heresy to the emotional well-being of most progressives. But here's the question: Do we want to feel better or do we want to be effective? Are we sentimentalists or are we warriors? For "sustainable" to mean anything, we must embrace and then defend the bare truth: the planet is primary. The life-producing work of a million species is literally the earth, air, and water that we depend on. No human activity-not the vacuous, not the sublime-is worth more than that matrix. Neither, in the end, is any human life. If we use the word " sustainable" and don't mean that, then we are liars of the worst sort: the kind who let atrocities happen while we stand by and do nothing. Even if it were possible to reach narcissists, we are out of time. Admitting we have to move f orward without them, we step away f rom Slide 21: 26 Part I: Resistance the cloying childishness and optimistic white-lite denial of so much of the left and embrace our adult knowledge. With all apologies to Yeats, in knowledge begins responsibilities. It's to you grown-ups, the grieving and the raging, that we address this book. The vast majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led, cajoled, or forced. If the structural determinants are in place for people to live their lives without doing damage-for example, if they're hunter gatherers with respected elders-then that's what happens. If, on the other hand, the environment has been arranged for cars, industrial schooling is mandatory, resisting war taxes will land you in jail, food is only available through giant corporate enterprises selling giant corpo rate degradation, and misogynist pornography is only a click away 24/7-well, welcome to the nightmare. This culture is basically con ducting a massive Milgram experiment on us, only the electric shocks aren't fake-they're killing off the planet, species by species. But wherever there is oppression there is resistance. That is true everywhere, and has been forever. The resistance is built body by body from a tiny few, from the stalwart, the brave, the determined, who are willing to stand against both power and social censure. It is our pre diction that there will be no mass movement, not in time to save this planet, our home. That tiny percent-Margaret Mead's small group of thoughtful, committed citizens-has been able to shift both the cul tural consciousness and the power structures toward justice in times past. It is valid to long for a mass movement, however, no matter how much we rationally know that we're wishing on a star. Theoretically, the human race as a whole could face our situation and make some decisions-tough decisions, but fair ones, that include an equitable dis tribution of both resources and justice, that respect and embrace the limits of our planet. But none of the institutions that govern our lives, from the economic to the religious, are on the side of justice or sus tainability. Theoretically, these institutions could be forced to change. The history of every human rights struggle bears witness to how courage and sacrifice can dismantle power and injustice. But again, it Slide 22: The Problem 27 takes time. If we had a thousand years, even a hundred years, building a movement to transform the dominant institutions around the globe would be the task before us. But the Western black rhinoceros is out of time. So is the golden toad, the pygmy rabbit. No one is going to save this planet except us. So what are our options? The usual approach of long, slow institu tional change has been foreclosed, and many of us know that. The default setting for environmentalists has become personal lifestyle "choices." This should have been predictable as it merges perfectly into the demands of capitalism, especially the condensed corporate version mediating our every impulse into their profit. But we can't consume our way out <?f environmental collapse; consumption is the problem. We might be forgiven for initially accepting an exhortation to "simple living" as a solution to that consumption, especially as the major envi ronmental organizations and the media have declared lifestyle change our First Commandment. Have you accepted compact fluorescents as your personal savior? But lifestyle change is not a solution as it doesn't address the root of the problem. We have believed such ridiculous solutions because our perception has been blunted by some portion of denial and despair. And those are legitimate reactions. I'm not persuading anyone out of them. But do we want to develop a strategy to manage our emotional state or to save the planet? And we've believed in these lifestyle solutions because everyone around us insists they're workable, a collective repeating mantra of "renewables, recycling" that has dulled us into belief. Like Eichmann, no one has told us that it's wrong. Until now. So this is the moment when you will have to decide. Do you want to be part of a serious effort to save this planet? Not a serious effort at collective delusion, not a serious effort to feel better, not a serious effort to save you and yours, but an actual strategy to stop the destruction of everything worth loving. If your answer feels as imper ative as instinct, read on. Slide 23: 28 Part I: Resistance Q: Won't we just reach a tipping point in public opinion? Derrick Jensen: In 2004, George W. Bush received more than 62 mil lion votes in the United States. Admittedly, the Democrats are just the good cop in a good cop/bad cop scenario, but that doesn't alter the fact that 62 million people voted for George W. Bush. Now people are camping out overnight to get Sarah Palin's signature. In the small county where I live there are a few issues that will get enough people excited to storm the board of supervisor's office. One is that they want to maintain their ability to grow small amounts of marijuana. Another is that they want the right to drive ORVs anywhere they goddamn please. People are not rioting over the unwillingness of this government to provide health care. People aren't rioting over the toxification of the total environment and their loved ones dying of cancer. They're not rioting over the United States spending billions of dollars-billions and billions of dollars-to kill people all over the world. And, in fact, one of the smartest political moves that any politician can make is to increase the military budget. That is tremendously popular. This culture must be undone completely. That's an absolute neces sity. Humanity lived without industrialism for most of its existence. And industrialism is killing the planet. Humans cannot exist without the planet. The planet (and sustainable human existence) is more important than industrialism. Of course, we would all rather have a voluntary transformation, a tipping point. But if this tipping point does not occur, we need a backup plan. Q: I'm a fan of Daniel Quinn. He says we should just walk away. I know there is something wrong here. What do you think? Derrick Jensen: There are two problems with this. With civilization having metastasized across the globe and bombing the moon, where are you supposed to walk to? Are you supposed to walk to the melting Arctic? Are you supposed to walk to the middle of the ocean, where Slide 24: The Problem 29 there's forty-eight times as much plastic as there is phytoplankton? Where are you supposed to go? There is dioxin in every mother's breast milk, so you can't even drink breast milk without getting dioxin. There are carcinogens in every stream in the United States and, presumably, in the world. Where are you supposed to go? Some respond to this by saying, "Oh, no, it's supposed to be a mental state. We're supposed to walk away emotionally and withdraw." But the real physical world is the basis for all life and you cannot with draw from that. Withdrawal in the face of moral complexity is no answer. Withdrawal in the face of atrocity is no answer. Two hundred species went extinct today. When faced with those committing atrocities, it is incumbent upon you to stop those atrocities using any means necessary. If you were being tortured to death in some basement, and I knew this, would you want me to walk away? Would you accept it if I said, "Oh, here's would you call anyone else who did that? .,.: . an answer, I will walk away." What would you call me if I did that? What Slide 25: !llapttr 2 Civilization and Other Hazards by Anc McBay The only defense of this monstrous absurdity [cap and trade schemes] that I have heard is, "Well, you are right, it's no good, but the train has left the station. n If the train has left, it had better be derailed soon or the planet, and all of us, will be in deep doo·doo. -James Hansen, climate scientist try telling yourself you are not accountable to the life of your tribe the breath of your planet -Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and essayist So what are we up against? Think for a moment about the ecological legacy of the dominant cul ture, its wholesale destruction of entire landbases ("impact on the environment," in the mealy-mouthed words of industrial apologists) . The Aral Sea, between what are now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is a perfect example. Its name means "sea of islands," after the thousands of islands scattered across the once-fertile waters. In the 1950s, the USSR instituted an intensive industrial irrigation program meant to tum the Aral Sea's basin into a vast cotton plantation. At the time the sea was still huge-by area it could easily have swallowed Denmark, Sri Lanka, or the Dominican Republic. But the sea shrank rapidly from the 19 60s onward, starved of water, and the growing salinity wiped out fish and other creatures. Now less than 10 percent of the s ea remains. The moderating effect of the sea is gone; once-temperate summers are hot and dry, the winters long and cold. Where there was once a sea filled with life, there is now a dead and dusty plain, mad e toxic by decades of accumulated fertilizer and industrial waste. Vozrozhdeniya Island (well, formerly an island) holds the ruins of a Soviet bioweapons facility. Abandoned ships scatter the poisonous plain, their rusting hulks monuments to a time when the sea had fish-and w ater. 31 Slide 26: 32 Part I: Resistance It's hard to think of a better term than postapocalyptic. But the apoc alypse is not yet post; the remnants of the sea continue to shrink. There were three separate salty "lakes" left from the Aral Sea, but as I write one lake has finally succumbed and evaporated. Now only two briny, toxic remnants remain of the vast sea of islands. What happened in the Aral Sea is happening everywhere, and fast. It took fifty years to turn the Aral Sea into a desert, but that same area of land is lost to desert every single year in the rest of the world. It's not hard to find entire biomes that have been destroyed by this culture. The prairies of the American West. The ancient forests of the Middle East. At this point it's much harder to find a biome that destroyed. And in some places those in power are just getting started, like in the case of the Athabasca Tar Sands under much of northern Alberta. The tar sands are subterranean deposits of bitumen mixed with sand, with many of the deposits underlying boreal forest. (If you were looking to find the "least destroyed biome," the world's boreal forest would be a good candidate; pre-global warming, anyway.) To get at the tar sands, oil companies literally scrape away the living forest and soils on the sur face. Then they dig out the sands, taking about two tons of sand per barrel of oil they produce. Then, water drained from nearby rivers is used to wash the bitumen out of the sand-several volumes of water are used for every volume of oil-leaving a toxic water-oil by-product that kills fish, birds, and indigenous people living in the area. If you simply hated the land and wanted to destroy it, you would be hard pressed to find a more vicious way of doing it. Huge quantities of natural gas are used to cook the bitumen into a synthetic oil. The energy required means that oil produced from tar sands produces at least five times as much greenhouse gases as conventional oil. If you wanted to come up with even consume fossil fuels, congratulations. # hasn't been nastier way to All of this is a clear pattern. The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological rela tionship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it's long past time for us to recognize the pattern. Slide 27: Civilization and Other Hazards 33 The crises facing the planet do not stem from human nature,' but from, as we previously discussed, the mode of social and political organiza tion we call civilization. What do we need to know about civilization to defeat it? It is globalized. Civilization spans the globe and, despite superficial political boundaries, is integrated infrastructurally and economically. Any local resistance effort faces an opponent with global resources, so effective strategies must be enacted around the world. However, civi lization approaches finite limits-83 percent of the biosphere is already under direct human influence.' It is mechanized. An industrial civilization requires machines for production. Mechanization has centralized political and economic power by moving the means of production beyond the scale at which human communities function equitably and democratically. It has cre ated a dramatic population spike (through industrial agriculture) and global ecological devastation (through industrial fishing, logging, and so on)) Most humans are now dependent on industrial "production," while the system itself is utterly dependent on finite minerals and energy-dense fossil fuels.4 It is very young on cultural, ecological, and geological timescales, but seems old on a personal timescale. Civilized history spans a few thou sand years, human history several millions, and ecological history several billions.5 But since much traditional knowledge has been lost or destroyed by those in power in order to glorify civilization, normalize their oppression, and render alternative ways of living unthinkable, we have the impression that civilization is as old as time. It is primarily an urban phenomenon. Civilizations emerge from and promote the growth of cities.6 Cities offer a pool of workers who, crowded together and severed from land, must labor to survive? Urban areas are densely surveilled and policed. Urban areas are epicentres of strife when civilizations fall; as Lewis Mumford wrote, "Each historic civilization ... begins with a living urban core, the polis, and ends in a common graveyard of dust and bones, a Necropolis, or city of the dead: fire-scorched ruins, shattered buildings, empty workshops, heaps of meaningless refuse, the population massacred or driven into slavery."g Slide 28: 34 Part I: Resistance It employs an extensive division of labor and high degree of social stratification. Specialization increases production, but a narrow focus prevents most people from making systemic criticisms of civilization; they are too worried about their immediate lives and problems to look at the big picture. Similarly, social stratification keeps power central ized and maintains an underclass to perform undesirable labor. Modern civilization, with its vast manufacturing capacity, has so far produced a large middle class in the rich nations, a historically unique circumstance. Though such people are unwilling to risk this privilege by challenging industrial society, prolonging collapse will ensure that they lose that privilege-and much more. It is militarized. Civilizations, intrinsically expansionist and vora cious, are intensely competitive. The military is prioritized in politics, industry, and science, and this sometimes rears its head as overt fas cism. Control of citizens is implemented through police. As anthropologist Stanley Diamond wrote, "Civilization originates in con quest abroad and repression at home."9 Glorification of the military causes people to identify with the state and its spectacular violence, and advertises the consequences of fighting back. Closely related, and in spite of feminist advances, civilization is patri archal and exalts masculinity. Civilization systematically oppresses women and celebrates the masculine expression of power and violence. It is based on large-scale agriculture. Hunting, gathering, and horti culture cannot support civilizations. Only intensive, large-scale agriculture can provide the "surplus" to support cities and specialized elites. Historical agriculture was heavily dependent on slavery, serfdom, and cruelties. Industrial agriculture depends upon petroleum, an arrangement that will not last. From the beginning it has been predicated on perpetual growth. This I growth is inseparable from agriculture and settlement; settlement requires agriculture, which results in population growth and milita rized elites who control the resources, and begins to overburden and destroy the local landbase. Societies, cultures, and businesses that expand in the short term do so at the expense of entities that grow more slowly (or not at all) , regardless of long-term consequences. In other words, civilization is characterized Slide 29: Civilization and Other Hazards 35 by short-term thinking; the structure ofcivilization rewards those who think in the short term and those who take more than they give back. Because those in power take more than they give back, they often win in the short term. But because ultimately you cannot win by taking more from the land than it gives willingly, they must lose in the long term. Because of its drive toward war, ecological destructiveness, and per petual expansion in a finite world, the history of civilizations is de fined by collapse. Throughout history, civilizations have either collapsed or been conquered, the conquerors going on to meet one or both of those fates. Collapse is the typical, not exceptional, outcome for a civilization. As Gibbon wrote of Rome: "The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it subsisted for so 10ng." lo Civilization is hierarchical and centralized both politically and infra structurally. This is self-perpetuating; those in power want more power, and they have the means to get it. Superficially, global power is held by a number of different national governments; in the modem day those governments are mostly in the thrall of a corporate capitalist elite. In social terms, civilization's hierarchy is pervasive and standardized; most political and corporate leaders are interchangeable, replaceable com ponents. The corollary of the centralization of power is the externalization of consequences (such as destroying the planet) . Wher ever possible, the poor and nonhumans are made to experience those consequences so the wealthy can remain comfortable. Hierarchy and centralization result in increasing regulation o behavior f and increasing regimentation. With the destruction of traditional kinship systems and methods of conflict resolution caused by the expansion of civilization and the rise of heavily populated urban centers, those in power have imposed their own laws and systems to enforce hierarchy and regulation. As a means of enforcing hierarchy and regulation, civilization also makes major investments in monumental architecture and propaganda. Past civilizations had pyramids, coliseums, and vast military marches to impress or cow their populations. Although modem civilizations still have monumental architecture (especially in the form of superstores and megamalls) , the wealthier human population is immersed in vir- Slide 30: 36 Part I: Resistance tual architecture-a twenty-four-hour digital spectacle of noise and propaganda. Civilization also requires large amounts of human labor, and is based on either compelling that labor directly or systematically removing fea sible livelihood alternatives. We're often told that civilization was a step forward which freed people from the "grind" of subsistence. If that were true, then the history of civilization would not be rife with slavery, conquest, and the spread of religious and political systems by the sword. Spending your life as a laborer for sociopaths is only appealing if equitable land-based communities-and the landbase itself-are destroyed. In other words, civilization perpetuates itself by producing deliberate conditions of scarcity and deprivation. Civilization is capable ofmaking Earth uninhabitable for humans and the majority of living species. Historical civilizations self-destructed before causing global damage, but global industrial civilization has been far more damaging than its predecessors. We no longer have the option of waiting it out. There is nowhere left to go. Civilization will collapse one way or another, and it's our job to insure that something is left afterward. The dominant culture isn't only a serial killer-it's also an amnesiac. Entire species and biomes are not just wiped out, but forgotten. And worse, they are deliberately erased, scratched out of history. People don't recognize this culture's pattern of ecocide because they don't mourn for all that has already been lost, been killed. Everyone knows what a penguin is, right? Well, the name didn't always refer to the cute Antarctic birds. The name, wh�ch means fat one, formerly referred to the great auk, the seabird that populated Atlantic islands in vast numbers. Only when the great auk was hunted to extinction (and then forgotten by most) did the moniker move to the South Pole. Cod are another example. Abundant cod swam off the coast of New foundland and the Maritimes. They were so numerous that it took a long time to fish them to the brink of extinction. II And yet, you can still Slide 31: Civilization and Other Hazards 37 buy cod at the grocery store. Why? Because the name has been taken for marketing reasons. If you buy something labeled cod, you no longer get true Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). Instead you get something that has been deliberately mislabeled: rockfish (Sebastes spp.) or Alaska pol lack (Theragra chalcogramma) or the poisonous oilfish ( Ruvettus pretiosus). This constantly happens in the seafood industry-a species is wiped out, and replaced by a renamed or deliberately mislabeled fish. And then that one is wiped out and the cycle continues. All of this gives grocery shoppers and eaters a sense that things are fine. They hear about bad things happening to fish on the news, maybe, but there's still plenty to eat at the store, so what's the problem? But if you take a moment to think about it, this renaming is deeply dis turbing. It's like going home to find that a serial killer has murdered your family and replaced them with bystanders plucked off the street, renamed after your dead kin. The killer sits there in your house, grin ning, insisting that everything is fine. We don't need to know every single casualty of this culture to fight back (although every one I learn about fills me with more ardor to do so) . But we cannot understand the severity and urgency of our situa tion, nor can we formulate an appropriate response, without first understanding at least some of these crises. I N DUSTRIAL PRACTICES THAT A R E TOXI C OR INCOMPATI B LE WITH LIFE Global warming is caused by the emission of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, as well as other industrial activities and land destruction. Concentrations of atmospheric methane have increased by about 250 percent from preindustrial levels. The preindustrial con centration of C02 was about 280 ppm (parts per million) . In 2005 it passed 379 ppm. In 20IO it stands at 392 ppm. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I PCC) estimates that it could reach 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2IOO. However, many climate scientists believe that levels must be kept beneath 350 ppm to avoid "irreversible cata strophic effects. "1 2 Models predict a temperature increase of 2.4 to 6 .4°C (4.3 to I I .5°F) Slide 32: 38 Part I: Resistance during the twenty-first century. ') An average increase of that amount would be bad enough, but the increase won't be distributed evenly. Instead, some areas will be subjected to smaller increases, while many regions will be subjected to severe temperature increases upward of 8°C (14.4°F) . There will also be with year-to-year variation, some years a few degrees cooler, and others a few degrees warmer. These stacked effects will further add to the potential extremes. Rare (every ten years) extreme weather events, such as major storms, could happen every year. Catastrophic events that should happen once in a hundred years could happen every decade. The effects of greenhouse gas emissions are delayea because it takes time for the extra heat captured by the atmosphere to accumulate. We are only now feeling the effects of decades-old emissions, and current emissions will take decades to have their full effect. Even if emissions stopped immediately, existing gases would contribute to global warming and rising sea levels for at least one thousand years.'4 Fur thermore, global warming becomes self-sustaining beyond a certain point. As tundra melts, frozen organic matter will thaw and release great gouts of greenhouse gases. Drastic climate changes will damage many such biomes, causing them to release more carbon. Projections are one thing, but paleontologists have implicated global warming in all but one of Earth's prehistoric mass extinctions. 'S The most severe mass die-off, dubbed the "Great Dying," happened a quarter of a billion years ago and wiped out 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land-based vertebrates.,6 A massive release of methane from the ocean floor has been blamed. Currently, in the Arctic Ocean warming has forced methane to bubble up in great, churning plurnes.'7 NASA says a tipping point that woul� lead to "dis astrous effects" will be reached by 2 0 17. '8 Others argue that such a tipping point-perhaps one of several-has already been reached.'9 Of course, for many species and cultures on or past the brink of extinc tion, it has certainly already been reached. Global warming is most urgent, but more insidious forms of pollution causing the poisoning of the planet lurk. Researchers at Cornell Uni versity blamed 40 percent of all human deaths on water, air, and soil Slide 33: Civilization and Other Hazards 39 pollution!O Speaking from my experience as a paramedic-and my personal experience seeing friends or loved ones facing cancer and sim ilar diseases-I can tell you that death by pollution is usually a ghastly way to go. It is not quick or painless, but a drawn-out descent into slow asphyxiation (in the case of diseases caused by air pollution), and sores, rashes, and tumors (in the others) . This is worse even than the myth of nature red in tooth and claw; being eaten by a bear or a tiger is fast and merciful compared to a gasping, hacking death by coal lung. And think of the sheer numbers of deaths. Every year some 57 million humans die from all causes, which means that 23 million of them are killed by pollution. That's 63,000 per day or the equivalent of twenty one September II attacks every day. The burden of ecocide is felt most by the poor. In China's bur geoning cities, smoke from coal-burning stoves and cooking oil kills 300,000 people per year. 21 And it has long been known that pollution spewing industrial facilities and hazardous waste sites are much more likely to be placed where people of color live, rather than in predomi nantly white areas!2 Though agricultural or sanitation problems do cause runoff and water contamination, industry is the main pollution culprit. When industry stops or declines, pollution levels drop immediately. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 caused such a decline in air pollution. Twenty-four hours after the blackout began, sulphur dioxide levels dropped 90 percent, stratospheric ozone levels 50 percent, and light scattering particulates 70 percent. 23 More insidious types of pollution aren't so responsive. Persistent organic pollutants, the poisons that accumulate and biomagnify in body fat, have become globally ubiquitous. These pollutants endure for cen turies, and on breaking down may release more toxic by-products. This crisis requires immediate action to prevent further accumulation. 24 An essential dynamic of civilization is the centralization ofpower and the externalization ofconsequences. The last fifty years have clearly seen a fusion of runaway corporatism, militarism, and the systematic exploitation of the poor, both domestically and internationally. To con tinue the centralization of power, the expansion of capitalism, and Slide 34: 40 Part I: Resistance resource extraction, those in power must destroy traditional, land-based cultures and increase social control. The destruction of indigenous and sustainable cultures is unre lenting. Language is a good indicator. There are some 6,800 human languages, of which 750 are extinct or nearly extinct. Of 300 indige nous North American languages, only 30 are expected to remain by the year 2050. About half of all languages are endangered,>; The gap between the rich and the poor has continued to grow rap idly. The income of the richest I percent of people equals that of the poorest 57 percent. 26 The three richest people own more than the poorest 10 percent of people combined. This inequality occurs both between and within countries. In 1992 the pay ratio between the CEO and the average American worker was about 42 to I . By the year 2000 it had grown to 525 to I. Civilization is not one hierarchy, but multiple interlocking hierar chies and systems of oppression based on gender, race, and class. For example, women do two-thirds of global work, earn less than 1 0 per cent of wages, and own less than I percent of wealth. 27 We can make similar observations about race and class. Some say that even the poor are wealthier now than ever before in history, which depends on how you measure "wealth." (But that's not very meaningful when the global economy is based on dwindling sup plies of finite resources, meaning such "wealth" is short-lived and based on future impoverishment.) The next fifty years aside, the past fifty are telling. In 2007 some 57 percent of 6.5 billion people were malnour ished, up from 20 percent of a 2.5 billion population in 1950,>8 This wealth and well-being gap is partly a by-product of the mantra of profit-at-any-cost, but also from deliberate attempts to harm or " impoverish, so that marginalized people are less able to mount resist ance against occupation and resource extraction. As Nobel Peace Prize laureate and war criminal Dr. Henry Kissinger infamously advised, " Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the U S economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries." International policies like structural adjustment programs (SAPs) Slide 35: Civilization and Other Hazards 41 are just the latest form of colonialism. SAPs force poor countries to increase tax collection and cut government spending, sell off public lands and enterprises to private corporations, and remove restrictions (like those pesky labor and environmental policies) on trade and the generation of profit. SAPs have been criticized from the beginning for dramatically increasing poverty and inequality, reversing land reforms, and forcing people off the land and into urban slums.29 These policies often go hand in hand with inducements to borrow money from the industrialized nations to buy infrastructure or com modities from those very countries, one of many practices which has resulted in crushing debt in the third world. In some countries, such as Kenya and Burundi, debt repayment vastly outstrips spending on social services like health care. The cancellation of debt has been shown to result in a prompt and significant increase in social spending.J° The poor countries of the world pay about $4 million in debt per hour. Enormous as this may seem when we compare it to our own house hold budgets, it's small compared to the $58 million the US spends on the military each hourY According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military spending now exceeds 1.3 tril lion dollars. Although spending dipped after the end of the Cold War, it began to climb more steeply with the so-called War on Terror and has now approached its previous peakY The United States, which uses the majority of its discretionary budget on the military, spends almost as much as all other countries combined, and, after accounting for inflation, recently surpassed its own Cold War record for annual spending.31 There have been social advances over the last century, especially in civil rights for people of color and women. But human societies ulti mately rest on the foundation of the landbase, and global ecocide threatens to reverse the progress that has been made. Economic crises will occur and worsen, but they are difficult to predict because finance is imaginary. The state of the real world, on the other hand, requires no speculation. In Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, William R. Catton Jr. identifies "drawdown" as "an inherently temporary expedient Slide 36: 42 Part I: Resistance by which life opportunities [i.e., carrying capacity] for a species are tem porarily increased by extracting from the environment for use by that species some significant fraction of an accumulated resource that is not being replaced as fast as it is drawn down." Drawdown means using reserves, rather than income, to meet yearly demand. costs of operating industrial society. The dominant culture is utterly reliant on drawdown, such that it is hard to identify something that's Industrial drawdown increases both the human population and the "overhead" not being drawn down at a staggering rate. The most crucial substances to industrial society and human life-soil, water, cheap energy, food stocks-are exactly those being drawn down most rapidly. And as Catton writes, the use of drawdown is an "inescapably dead-end" approach. Cheap oil undergirds every aspect of industrial society. Without oil, industrial farms couldn't grow food, consumer goods couldn't be trans ported globally, and superpowers couldn't wage war on distant countries. Peak oil is already causing disruption in societies around the world, with cascading effects on everything from food production to the global economy. Peak oil extraction has passed and extraction will decline from this point onward. No industrial renewables are adequate substitutes. Richard C. Duncan sums it up in his " Olduvai Theory" of industrial civilization. Duncan predicted a gradual per capita energy decline between 1979 and 1999 (the "slope") followed by a "slide" of energy production that "begins in 2000 with the escalating warfare in the Middle East" and that "marks the all-time peak of world oil production." After that is the "cliff," which "begins in 2012 when an epidemic of permanent blackouts spreads worldwide, i.e. , first there are waves of brownouts and temporary blackouts, then finally the electric power net works themselves expire."34 According to Duncan, 2030 marks the end of industrial civilization and a return to "global equilibrium"-namely, the Stone Age. Natural gas is also near peak production. Other fossil fuels, such as tar sands and coal, are harder to access and offer a poor energy return. The ecological effects of extracting and processing those fuels (let alone I Slide 37: Civilization and Other Hazards 43 the effects of burning them) would be disastrous even compared to petroleum's abysmal record. Will peak oil avert global warming? Probably not. It's true that cheap oil has no adequate industrial substitute. However, the large use of coal predates petroleum. Even postcollapse, it's possible that large amounts of coal, tar sands, and other dirty fossil fuels could be used. Although peak oil is a crisis, its effects are mostly beneficial: reduced burning of fossil fuels, reduced production of garbage, and decreased consumption of disposable goods, reduced capacity for superpowers to project their power globally, a shift toward organic food growing methods, a necessity for stronger communities, and so on. The worst effects of peak oil will be secondary--caused not by peak oil, but by the response of those in power. Suffering a shortage of fossil fuels? Start turning food into fuel or cutting down forests to digest them into synthetic petroleum. Economic collapse causing people to default on their mortgages? Fuel too expen sive to run some machines? The capitalists will find a way to kill two birds with one stone and institute a system of debtors prisons that will double as forced labor camps. A large number of prisons in the US and around the world already make extensive use of barely paid prison laborers, after all. Mass slavery, gulags, and the like are common in pre industrial civilizations. You get the idea. Industrial civilization is heavily dependent on many different finite resources and materials, a fact which makes its goal of perpetual growth impossible. In particular, certain metals are in short supply.35 Running out of cheap platinum wouldn't have much ecological impact. But shortages of more crucial minerals, like copper, will hamper industrial society's ability to cope with its own collapse. Severe shortages and high prices will worsen the social and ecological practices of mining companies (bad as they are now) . These short ages would also represent a failure of industrial civilization's fundamental and false promise to expand and bring its benefits to all people in the world. According to one study, upgrading the infra structure in the "developing world" to the status of the "developed world" would require essentially all of the copper and zinc (and pos- Slide 38: 44 Part I: Resistance sibly all the platinum) in the earth's crust, as well as near-perfect metal recycling.36 The growing global f ood crisis is a severe confluence of economic, polit ical, and ecological factors. Right now plenty of food is being produced, but for economic reasons it isn't being distributed fairly. If, at its apex of production, industrial agriculture can't feed everyone, imagine what will happen when it collapses. Prices for corn and rice are already dra matically increasing, in part because of biofuels, even though the biofuel industry is still small. The food crisis is going to get worse, but it's not going to be a " Malthusian crisis," in which a crisis exponential population growth outpaces increasing agricultural production. Our crisis is likely to cul minate in a decrease in agricultural production caused by energy decline and increasing use of biofuels, and worsened by climate change and ecological damage. Sustainable ways of growing food are labor-inten sive because they are horticultural and polycultural, rather than agricultural and monocultural. (That is, sustainable methods are small scale and ecologically diverse, rather than the opposite.) As soil microbiologist Peter Salonius states flatly, " Intensive crop culture for high population[s) is unsustainable. "37 The longer humanity waits before switching to sustainable food sources and reversing population growth, the greater the disparity will be between carrying capacity and population. The food crisis is deeply tied to two other ecological crises: I water draw down and soil loss. Industrial water consumption is drying up rivers and swallowing entire aquifers around the world. Although shallow groundwater can gradually be replenished by rainfall, when those supplies become depleted many farms and industries use deep wells with pow erful pumps to extract water from fossil aquifers , which aren't replenished by rainfall. This shift to industrial drilling for water essentially water mining-has caused major drops in water tables. In I ndia, for example, deep electrically pumped wells used by large cash crop monoculture farms have caused a major drop in water tables. This means small and subsistence farmers who use hand wells are losing Slide 39: Civilization and Other Hazards 45 their water supplies, a disaster which has caused a dramatic rise in sui cides.l8 Approximately half of hand-dug wells in I ndia-up to 95 percent of all wells in some regions-are now dry, driving an aban donment of rural villages. In the grain-growing regions of central China, the water table is dropping about 3 meters (10 feet) per year, and up to twice as fast in other areas.l9 Chinese wheat production fell by 34 million tons between I 9 98 and 2005, a gap larger than the annual wheat production of Canada.40 In Saudi Arabia (as well as other countries), the technology being used for well drilling is now a modified version of oil drilling technology, because many wells must exceed one kilometer in depth to reach fresh water. Access to groundwater has always allowed agriculturalists to occa sionally consume more water than rained down each year, but now farming around the world has become dependent on its overcon sumption. And make no mistake, drawdown of aquifers through deep drilling and pumping is utterly driven by and dependent on a highly industrialized culture. Without industrial machinery, even the most unsustainable society would be limited to drawing the amount of water that the water table could sustainably recharge each year. Furthermore, water used by industry and agriculture far outweighs residential water use, and typically less than I percent of residential water is actually used f drinking. or Among the most threatening crisis is soil drawdown and desertification. I t takes a thousand years for the earth to create a few inches of topsoil. Currently, topsoil is being lost at ten to twenty times the rate at which it can be replenished. In his book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, geol ogist David Montgomery traces the collapse of previous civilizations that destroyed the topsoil upon which they depended. He estimates that about I percent of the world's topsoil is lost each year.41 According to United Nations University, by 2025 Africa may only have enough intact land to feed 25 percent of its human populationY Desertification is primarily caused by overcultivation, deforestation, overgrazing, and climate change. About 30 percent of Earth's land sur face is at risk of desertification, including 70 percent of all drylands. Slide 40: 46 Part I: Resistance Fifty-two thousand square kilometers are turned to desert each year; about the area of Hong Kong is turned to desert each week. The U N reports that desertification threatens the livelihood of one billion people in 1 1 0 countries.43 More land was converted into cropland in the three decades fol lowing 1950 than in the fifteen decades following 17°°.44 Cultivated lands now cover about one quarter of the earth's land surface, but about 40 percent of agricultural land in the world has become degraded in the last fifty years.45 Further expansion of agriculture to move beyond damaged lands is no longer an option-humans already occupy 98 per cent of the areas where rice, wheat, or com can be grown.46 Canadian been exhausted, the soils of the earth will be so degraded that the planet will only be able to support 100 million to 300 million people.47 Per capita seafood consumption has tripled since 195°.48 Thanks to research scientist Peter Salonius estimates that once petroleum has overjishing, between 1950 and 2003, 90 percent of the large fish in the ocean have been wiped out, and those who remain are smaller.49 Since then, industrial fishing has continued to take more fish each year. By the midpoint of the twenty-first century, scientists estimate, all oceanic fish stocks worldwide will have collapsed. 50 Bottom trawling, a form of industrial fishing that involves dragging heavy nets across the sea bottom, obliterates seafloor habitat and seafloor creatures in the "most destructive of any actions that humans conduct in the ocean."51 Every six months, bottom trawlers drag an area the size of the continental United States. The orange roughy is just one of the creatures who have been deci mated by this practice. These fish may grow to nearl); three feet in length, and live up to one and a half centuries. Because they are so long lived and slow to mature, and because they produce few eggs compared to most fish, their populations are slow to rebound from any trouble. The assault of bottom trawling is ceaseless. Schools of orange roughy recently discovered near Australia have declined by 90 percent in a decadeY Orange roughies spend much of their time congregating in large schools. As scientific research has recently confirmed, fish are highly Slide 41: Civilization and Other Hazards 47 intelligent and social animals. Dr. Culum Brown of the University of Edinburgh writes, " I n many areas, such as memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of 'higher' vertebrates, including non human primates. "53 Doctor Brown, along with Doctors Kevin Laland and Jens Krause, go on to say that "fish are steeped in social intelli gence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions and co-operating to inspect predators and catch food. "54 Furthermore, they recognize their "shoal mates" (that is, their friends) and have long-term relation ships, follow the social prestige and relationships of others, and build complex nests. Of course, the rich social lives of fish-the researchers above use the word "culture"-are ignored by those who facilitate their industrial decimation. As with many resource extraction industries, large-scale commer cial fishing would not be economically feasible without heavy government subsidies. Economists have calculated that the expense of catching and marketing fish is almost twice as much as the value of the global catch.55 None of these figures, of course, include the true eco logical costs of destroying biomes that cover the majority of the earth's surface. And then there's deforestation. Global warming-induced mild winters have increased the spread of temperate forest pests like the mountain pine beetle. Massive tree kills caused by the beetle (and industrial log ging) have turned many Canadian forests from carbon sinks into carbon emitters.56 They are now contributing to accelerating warming, worsening the spread of pests like the pine beetle. Fully half of the mature tropical forests have been wiped out glob ally, and some areas have been hit especially hard. The Philippines have lost 90 percent of their forests, Haiti has lost 99 percent, and between 1990 and 2005 Nigeria lost 80 percent of its old-growth forest.57 Without major global action, by 2030 only 10 percent of the tropical f orest will remain intact, with another 10 percent in a fragmented and species will go extinct; global warming, drought, soil erosion, and land slides will all worsen severely. degraded condition. 58 If we don't prevent it, hundreds of thousands of Slide 42: 48 Part I: Resistance Tropical forests are being wiped out at a rate of 160.000 square kilo meters per year. with demand for biofuels driving that number upward.59 To put this into perspective. imagine lining all of that destruc tion up into one long swath that stretched from horizon to horizon in width and more than 16.000 kilometers in length.60 To walk this dis tance on the globe you would have to start in Cape Town. South Africa. walk the entire length of Africa to Cairo. hike across the Middle East to the tip of the Caspian Sea. and then traverse the entire width of Asia. finally stopping at the Bering Sea near Kamchatka. Or you could string it from the southern-most tip of Argentina all the way to Alaska. the length of South and North America combined. To walk that scar from end to end would take you eighteen months. during which you would see nothing but stumps and ash and dust and ruin. And because it would take you eighteen months to see only twelve months of destruc tion. you would never be able to see it all. The year 2005 broke all previous records for woodcutting.61 The har vesting of wood for fuel and lumber is only one factor. In the Amazon the main factor is clearing land for cattle-grazing pasture. Other causes include government subsidies for settlements. road building. and infra structure development. and commercial agriculture. mostly of soybeans for export. According to one researcher. " Soybean farms cause some forest clearing directly. But they have a much greater impact on defor estation by consuming cleared land. savanna. and transitional forests. thereby pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers ever deeper into the forest frontier. Soybean farming also provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects. which accelerate deforestation by other actors."62 As is the case with many forms of fiscally and industJially driven ecocide. analysts have noted that deforestation in Brazil is "strongly cor related" with the "health" of the economy. Periods of economic slowdown match periods of lesser deforestation. while a rapidly growing economy causes much greater deforestation. Writes Rhett Butler: " During lean times. ranchers and developers do not have the cash to rapidly expand their pasturelands and operations. while the gov ernment lacks funds to sponsor highways and colonization programs and grant tax breaks and subsidies to forest exploiters. "6l In other Slide 43: Civilization and Other Hazards 49 words, economic growth is bad for the health of the planet, and eco nomic contraction is good for the health of the planet. Much of the world's remaining tropical forest is in the Amazon. This enormous rainforest creates the moist climate it needs by tran spiring huge amounts of water and affecting air currents over the entire continent. Deforestation stops that transpiration and encour ages desertification. This may create a self-perpetuating cycle of drought that kills even the largest trees and further reduces transpi ration. Many ecologists believe that there is a tipping point beyond which this cycle would become irreversible and the Amazon would turn into a desert. 64 Some estimates put this tipping point as early as 2007, which would mean that action was required yesterday (or, second best, immediately). There is ample evidence that worsening drought is already well underway. 6 5 This cascading drought would not be limited to Latin America: " Scientists say that this would spread drought into the Northern Hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable. " 66 The media report on these crises as though they are all separate issues. They are not. They are inextricably entangled with each other and with the culture that causes them. As such, all of these problems have important commonalities, with major implications for our strategy to resist them. These problems are urgent, severe, and worsening, and the most worrisome hazards share certain characteristics: They are progressive, not probabilistic. These problems are getting worse. These problems are not hypothetical, projected, or "merely pos sible" like Y 2K, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, or supervolcanoes. These will continue to worsen. The only uncertainty is how fast, and thus how long our window of action is. crises are not "possible" or "impending"-they are well underway and They are rapid, but not instant. These crises arose rapidly, but often Slide 44: 50 Part I: Resistance not so rapidly as to trigger a prompt response; people get used to them, a phenomenon called the "shifting baselines syndrome. " For example, wildlife populations are often compared to measures from fifty years ago, instead of measures from before civilization, which makes the damage seem much less severe than it actually is.67 Even trends which appear slow at first glance (like global warming) are extremely rapid when considered over longer timescales, such as the duration of the human race or even the duration of civilization. They are nonlinear, and sometimes runaway or self-sustaining. The haz ards get worse over time, but often in unpredictable ways with sudden spikes or discontinuities. A might produce 10 percent increase of greenhouse gases 10 percent warming or it might cause far more. Also, the various crises interact to create cascading disasters far worse than any one alone. Hurricanes (such as Katrina) may be worsened by global warming and by habitat destruction in their paths ( Katrina's impact was worsened by wetlands destruction). The human impact may then be worsened further by poverty and the use of the police, military, and hired mercenaries (like Blackwater) 68 to impede the ability of those poor people to move freely or access basic and necessary supplies. These crises have long lead or lag times. The problems are often created long before they become a visible issue. They also grow or accelerate exponentially, such that action must be taken well in advance of the crisis to be effective. Although an alert minority is usually aware of the issue, the problem may have become very serious and entrenched before gaining the attention, let alone the action, of the majority. Peak oil was predicted with a high degree of accuracy in effect was discovered in 1956. 69 The greenhouse was predicted by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in 1824, and industrially caused global warming 18� 6.7° Hazards have deeply rooted momentum. These crises are rooted in the most fundamental practices and infrastructure of civilization. Social convention, the concentration of power, and dominant economic sys tems all prevent the necessary changes. I f ! ran a corporation and tried to be genuinely sustainable, the company would soon be outcompeted . and go bankrupt.7' If I were a politician and I banned the majority of unsustainable practices, I would promptly be ejected from office (or more likely, assassinated). Slide 45: Civilization and Other Hazards 51 They are industrially driven. In virtually all cases, industry is the pri mary culprit, either because it consumes resources itself (e.g., oil and coal) or permits resource extraction and global trade that would other wise be extremely difficult (e.g., bottom trawling) . Furthermore, industrial capitalism and industrial governments offer artificial subsi dies for ecocidal practices that would not otherwise be economically tenable. Factors like overpopulation (as discussed shortly) are secondary or tertiary at best. They provide bene to the powerful and costs to the powerless. The acts fits that cause these crises-all long-standing economic activities-offer short-term benefits to those who are already powerful. But these haz ards are most dangerous and damaging to the people who are poorest and most powerless. They f acilitate temporary victories and permanent losses. No successes we might have are guaranteed to last as long as industrial civilization stands. Conversely, most of our losses are effectively permanent. Extinct species cannot be resurrected. Overdrawn aquifers or clear-cut forests will not return to their original states on timescales meaningful to humans. The destruction of land-based cultures, and the deliberate impoverishment of much of humanity, results in major loss and long term social trauma. With sufficient action, it's possible to solve many of the problems we face, but if that action doesn't materialize in time, the effects are irreversible. Proposed "solutions " often make things worse. Because of all the quali ties noted above, analysis of the hazards tends to be superficial and based on short-term thinking. Even though analysts who look at the big picture globally may use large amounts of data, they often refuse to ask deeper or more uncomfortable questions. The hasty enthusiasm for industrial biofuels is one manifestation of this. Biofuels have been embraced by some as a perfect ecological replacement for petroleum. The problems with this are many, but chief among them is the simple fact that growing plants for vehicle fuel takes land the planet simply can't spare. Soy, palm, and sugar cane plantations for oil and ethanol are now driving the destruction of tropical rainforest in the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Critics like Jane Goodall and the Rainforest Action Network argue that the plantations on rainforest land destroy habitat Slide 46: 52 Part I: Resistance and water cycles, worsen global warming, destroy and pollute the soil, and displace land-based peoplesJ2 This so-called solution to the catas trophe of petroleum ends up being j ust as bad-if not worse-than petroleum. The hazards do not resultfrom any single program. They tend to result from the underlying structure and essential nature of civilization, not from any particular industry, technology, government, or social attitude. Even global warming, which is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, is the result of many kinds of industries using many kinds of fossil fuels as well as deforestation and agriculture. So how can we use what we know about the structure of industrial civ ilization, and about the most urgent problems it has caused, to inform our strategy and tactics? It's clear that some "solutions" can be imme diately discounted or deprioritized because they won't work in a reasonable time frame, and there's no time to waste. Unfortunately, most of the solutions offered by apologists for those in power fall into this category. Ineffective or less effective solutions are likely to have one or more of the following characteristics: They may reinf orce existing power disparities. Virtually any solution based on corporate capitalism is likely to meet this criterion. When Monsanto genetically engineers a plant to require less pesticides, they're not doing it to help the planet-they're doing it to make money, and so to increase their power. Carbon trading schemes are a clear example of this problem; they are capitalist shell games that allow cor porations to rake in more profits while avoiding any real accountability and passing the costs on to regular people. (If it's not clear to you how this would play out, consider how much money the average person paid in income taxes last year, and ask yourself why General Electric paid zero dollars.)?3 Ineffective solutions also suppress autonomy or sustainability that impedes profit. This is true both now and historically. Another way of phrasing this would be to say any solutions that require those in power Slide 47: Civilization and Other Hazards 53 to act against their own self-interest or otherwise behave in a way that fundamentally contradicts their known patterns of action will almost undoubtedly be ineffective, because these solutions will not be volun tarily implemented by those in power. Solutions that rely primarily on techno fixes or technological and polit ical elites acting through large-scale industrial infrastructure will be ineffective. Adequate technologies already exist (for example, the hand wells in India) to meet human needs, but are either not implemented or are ignored in favor of more damaging technologies. Furthermore, suggested solutions are often stacked on top of (and so, increase dependence on) the existing and destructive infrastructure, rather than routing around it. Photovoltaic solar panels are suggested as a solution to problems caused by industrial civilization, but making those panels requires more industry and doesn't address root causes. Solutions that encourage increasing consumption and population growth as a "solution" to existing problems also won't work. If you've gotten this far, we probably agree that any solution that encourages people to consume more-even if it's a nifty new hybrid S UV-is probably not going to be a suitable answer to our problem. And increasing popula tion as a solution to human problems, is, of course, silly. This course of action is sometimes argued for by suggesting that more humans bring more creativity. But doubling the number of people on the planet will not double the quality or quantity of solutions produced. Twice the number of people will, however, eat twice as much, drink twice as much, use twice as much energy, and so on. Attempts to solve a single problem without regard to other problems will also be ineffective. This sort of issue crops up often with "solutions" intended to solve energy problems. For example, ethanol from com has been pitched repeatedly as a replacement for oil. But the widespread use of com to make ethanol would worsen habitat destruction (by requiring more agricultural land) as well as worsening soil and water drawdown. Furthermore, ethanol from com produces only a small amount of energy beyond that required to grow and process the com. Ditto for solutions that involve great delays and postpone action until the distantfuture-for example, voluntary emissions reductions with a target date of 2050. It's almost impossible to catalogue the conse- Slide 48: 54 Part I: Resistance quences of further delay. Each day means more sustainable cultures destroyed, more species rendered extinct, more tipping points passed, more permanent losses. Each day also means an increasing gap between human population and carrying capacity, a gap with which we will have to reckon in the not-too-distant future. It's true that there is growing interest in ecology and living sustain ably in much of the world. But regardless of how you measure it, you cannot reasonably argue that this psychological shift toward sustain ability is happening faster than the damage done by industrial civilization. It's great that there is a growing interest in organic gar dening in the first world, but, meanwhile, millions of land-based peoples living in the third world are being forced from their land which means they can no longer grow their own food. The first-world organic gardeners are just a trickle compared to that flood. And prior to World War I I and the invention of chemical pesticides, all gardening was organic. We aren't exactly gaining ground. A similar problem applies technologically. Some people argue that we simply have to wait until advanced green technology surpasses unsustainable modern technology, but this doesn't make sense; unsus tainable technologies have an economic edge because they take more than they give back.74 Take the problem of overdrawn aquifers in China, where water tables are dropping several meters per year. It may still be possible to use hand-operated pumps in these areas. Let's say we wait a couple of decades for really cheap solar panels and pumps to become accessible to rural Chinese people. The water table will have fallen so far that they will need those solar-powered pumps just to survive because their hand wells will be dry. The purpose of those pumps will be to compensate for the ecological damage caused duripg the time it took to develop them-in other words, it won't be any easier to get water, and it will require more expense and equipment that they will have to pay for. One step forward and two steps back. Since damage is happening so much faster than recovery can, and is often more severe than even the most optimistic technologies could compensate for, sig nificant delays are not acceptable. Solutions that focus on changing individual lifestyles will also not be effective. As we've already discussed in this book and elsewhere, our Slide 49: Civilization and Other Hazards 55 problems are primarily of a systemic, not an individual, nature. Fur thermore, lifestyle solutions encourage people to think of themselves as consumers and act in the capacity of consumers. This is an extremely limiting approach that distracts us from our identities as human beings, as members of human and living communities, and as living creatures in general. The idea that vast numbers of people would simply withdraw from the capitalist economy is a fantasy. If we had a large enough number of committed people to make a dent in global consumption, we would have a large enough number of committed people to exert serious political force against destructive institutions. are primarily based on token, symbolic, or trivial actions, and a superficial approach. These kinds of solutions are what William R. Catton Jr. calls "cosmeticism"-"faith that relatively superficial adjustments in our activities" will keep the industrial age going-and they result from an acknowledgment of the fact that industrial civilization is destroying the world, but a refusal to accept the full implications of this problem. Though changing to compact fluorescents may offer some relief from guilt, to consider that as any kind of a meaningful solution is to ignore the nature of our predicament. Others f ocus on superficial On a closely related note, many ineffective suggested solutions or secondary causes, rather than the primary causal f actor. An example of this is the central focus that some people and organizations have on overpopulation. Damage caused by humans is primarily the result of overconsumption, not overpopulation. Though they may consume thirty times the resources of a third worlder, by focusing on overpopulation first worlders can displace responsibility for various problems to "those people. " This ignores the fact that even very large families of third worlders likely consume less than a single first worlder. Furthermore, the overpopulation that does exist is largely caused by unsustainable industrial technology and the use of resource drawdown and conquest to create phantom carrying capacity,75 Arguments around overpopulation are often framed in a racist fashion that places blame on people of color in third world countries. Furthermore, problems like malnutrition or hunger in the third world are often blamed on "backwardness" and a lack of industrial infra structure or technical knowledge. Of course, the key to reducing Slide 50: 56 Part I: Resistance damage is, and has long been, reducing consumption and the capacity of industrial civilizations to draw down resources and expand into lands and habitat belonging to others. That said, the fact that overpopulation isn't the main problem now does not make us immune from the consequences of adding more people. There are more humans on the planet than the planet can sup port (industrial or otherwise) . When drawdown mechanisms cease, we-especially our hypothetical children-will all have to deal with the consequences, and the fewer humans there are at the time the less hardship there will be. In general, though, the worst shortcoming of most suggested solu tions is that they are not consonant with the severity of the problem, the window oftime availablef eff ctive action, or the number ofpeople expected or e to act. The solution should not be dependent on the assumption that very large numbers of people will act against their initial inclinations if we can't reasonably expect that to happen. If we wanted to back the idea that the solution to a problem like global warming is for everyone to vol untarily stop using fossil fuels, then we would have to reasonably believe that this is a plausible scenario. Unfortunately, it is not. In contrast, effective solutions (or at least, more effective) are likely to share a different set of characteristics: They address root problems and are based on a "big picture" under standing of the situation. They include a long-term view of our situation, a critique of civilization, and a long-term plan. of strategic A corollary of that is that the solutions should involve,a higher level rigor. They should not be based on beautiful yet abstract ideas about what might make a better world, but derive from a tangible strategy that proposes a plan of action from point A to point B. They enable many different people to work toward addressing the problem. Rather than being dependent on elites, solutions should enable as many people as possible to participate. This is not the same as requiring everyone to act to take down civilization or requiring the majority of people to act in a way we don't reasonably expect them to Slide 51: Civilization and Other Hazards 57 act. It does mean, however, that our strategy should include a way for all-from the most restrained to the most militant-to have a role if they desire. Effective solutions are suitable to the scale ofthe problem, and take into account the reasonable lead time required for action and the number o f people expected to act. If we can only expect a small number of people to take serious action, then our plans must only require a small number of people. They involve immediate action AND planning for further long-term action. Crises like global warming cannot be addressed too soon. The most immediate action should target the worst contributors to each hazard, and happen as soon as possible. Subsequent actions should work their way down the severity scale. They make maximum use ofavailable levers andfulcrums. Which is to say, they play to our strengths and take advantage of the weaknesses of those who are trying to destroy the world. Each act should make as much impact as possible on as many different problems as possible. And ultimately, of course, effective solutions must directly or indi rectly work toward taking down civilization. s s � Q: How do I know that civilization is not redeemable? Derrick Jensen: Look around. Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Salmon are collapsing. Passenger pigeons are gone. gone, 99 percent of wetlands, 99 percent of native grasslands. What acknowledge that it's not redeemable? In A Eskimo curlews are gone. Ninety-eight percent of native forests are standards do you need? What is the threshold at which you will finally Language Older Than Words I explained how we all are suffering from what Judith Herman would call "Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Judith Herman asks, "What happens if you are raised in cap tivity? What happens if you're long-term held in captivity, as in a political prisoner, as in a survivor of domestic violence?" You come to Slide 52: 58 Part I: Resistance believe that all relationships are based on power, that might makes right, that there is no such thing as fully mutual relationships. That, of course, describes this culture's entire epistemology and this culture's entire way of relating. Indigenous peoples have said that the funda mental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded Westerners view listening to the nat ural world as a metaphor as opposed to the way the world really works. So the world consists of resources to be exploited, as opposed to other beings to enter into relationship with. We have been so traumatized that we are incapable of perceiving that real relationships are possible. That is one reason that this culture is not redeemable. Here is another answer. In The Culture ofMake Believe, I wrote about how this culture is irredeemable because the social reward systems of this culture lead inevitably to atrocity. This culture is based on compe tition as opposed to cooperation and, as such, will inevitably lead to wars over resources. Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist, tried to figure out why some cul tures are good (to·use her word) and some cultures are not good. In a good culture, men treat women well, adults treat children well, people are generally happy, and there's not a lot of competition. She found that the good cultures all have one thing in common. They figured out something very simple: they recognize that humans are both social creatures and selfish, and they merge selfishness and altruism by praising behaviors that benefit the group as a whole and disallowing behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the group. The bad cultures socially reward behavior that benefits the individual at the expense of the group. If you reward behavior that benefits the group, that's the sort of behavior you will get. If you reward b)havior that is selfish, acquisitive, that's the behavior you will get. This is Behavior Modification ! O I . This culture rewards highly acquisitive, psychopathological behavior, and that is the behavior we see. It's inevitable. Need another answer? In Endgame I explained that a culture that requires the importation of resources cannot be sustainable. In order to be sustainable a culture must help the landbase, but if your culture requires the importation of resources , it means you've denuded the Slide 53: Civilization and Other Hazards 59 · landbase of that particular resource. In other words , you have harmed your landbase. This is by definition unsustainable. As cities-which require the importation of resources-grow, they will denude and destroy ever larger areas. Because it is based on the importation of resources, this culture is functionally and inherently unsustainable. Further, any way oflife based on the importation of resources is also f unctionally based on violence, because if your way oflife requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over won't trade you for some necessary resource, you will take it, because you need it. So, to bring this to the present, we could all become enlightened, and the U S military would still have to be huge: how else will they get access to the oil they need to run the economy, oil that just happens to lie under someone else's land? The point is that no matter what we think of the irredeemability of this culture's mass psychology or system of rewards, this culture civilization-is also irredeemable on a purely functional level. Another reason this culture is irredeemably unsustainable is that we can talk all we want about new technologies, but so long as they require copper wiring, they are going to require an industrial infrastructure, and they are going to require a mining infrastructure, and that is inher ently unsustainable. More signs of irredeemability: right now the United States is spending $100 billion a year to invade and occupy Afghanistan. That is $3,500 for every Afghan man, woman, and child, per year. At the same time, everybody from right-wing pundits to the zombies on N P R ask the question, " Is it too expensive to stop global warming?" There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends. I look around in every direction and I see no sign of redeemability in this culture. The real physical world is being murdered. The pattern is there. We need to recognize that pattern, and then we need to stop those who are killing the planet. Slide 54: Illi!pter 3 Liberals and Radicals by Lierre Keith Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. . . . others imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen . . . . Despotic governments can stand "moral force" till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. -George Orwell, author and journalist Can it be done? Can industrial civilization be stopped? Theoretically, any institution built by humans can be taken apart by humans. That seems obvious as a concept. But in the here and now, in the time frame left to our planet, what is feasible? Here the left diverges. The faithful insist that Everything Will Be Okay. They play an emotional shell game of new technology, individual consumer choices, and hope as a moral duty. When all three shells tum up empty, the fall-back plan is an insistence in the belief that people can't really kill the planet. There will be bacteria if nothing else, they urge, as if that should give solace to the drowning bears and the van ished snails. Meanwhile, the facts tell a different story. Methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, is escaping from both land and sea where up until now it was sequestered by being frozen. This could lead to "a catastrophic warming of the earth.'" Catastrophic meaning a planet too hot for life-any life, all life. Kiss your mustard seed of bacteria good-bye: yes, we can kill the planet. It's a bankrupt approach regardless. Try this. Pretend that I have a knife and you don't. Pretend I slice off one of your fingers, then another, then a third. When you object-and you will object, with all your might-I tell you that I'm not going to kill you, just change you. Joint by joint, I continue to disarticulate someone still alive, who will 61 Slide 55: 62 Part I: Resistance very soon be dead. When you protest for your life, I tell you that you're not actually going to die, as there will surely be some bacteria remaining. Does that work for you? One would hope that a looming mass extinction would compel us to seek something beyond emotional solace wrapped in pseudospiritual platitudes. But strategies for action are an affront to the faithful. who need to believe in individual action. This faith is really just liberalism writ large. One of the cardinal differences between liberals-those who insist that Everything Will Be Okay-and the truly radical is in their con ception of the basic unit of society. This split is a continental divide. Liberals believe that a society is made up of individuals. Individualism is so sacrosanct that, in this view, being identified as a member of a group or class is an insult. But for radicals, society is made up of classes (economic ones in Marx's original version) or any groups or castes. In the radical's understanding, being a member of a group is not an affront. Far from it; identifying with a group is the first step toward political consciousness and ultimately effective political action. But classical liberalism was the founding ideology of the U S , and the values of classical liberalism-for better and for worse-have dis persed around the globe. The ideology of classical liberalism developed against the hegemony of theocracy. The king and church had all the economic, political . and ideological power. In bringing that power down, classic liberalism helped usher in the radical analysis and polit ical movements that followed. But the ideology has limits, both historically and in its contemporary legacy. The original founding fathers of the United States were not after a human rights utopia. They were merchant capitalists tired of the restrictions of the old order. The old world had a very clear hierarchy. This basic pattern is replicated in all the places that civtIizations have arisen. There's God (sometimes singular, sometimes plural) at the top, who directly chooses both the king and the religious leaders. These can be one and the same or those functions can be split. Underneath them are the nobles, the priests, and the military. Again, sometimes these groups are folded into one, and sometimes they're discrete. Beneath them are the merchants, traders, and skilled craftsmen. The base of the pyramid contains the bulk of the population: people in slavery, serfdom, Slide 56: Liberals and Radicals 63 or various forms of indenture. And all of this is considered God's will, which makes resistance that much more difficult psychologically. Standing up to an abuser-whether an individual or a vast system of power-is never easy. Standing up to capital "G" God requires an entirely different level of courage, which may explain why this arrange ment appears universally across civilizations and why it is so intransigent. In the West, one of the first blows against the Divine Right of Kings was in 1215, when some of the landed aristocracy forced King John to sign Magna Carta. It required the king to renounce some privileges and to respect legal procedures. It established habeas corpus and due process. Most important was the principle it claimed: the king and the church are bound by the law, not above it, and citizens have rights against their government. Magna Carta plunged England into a civil war, the First Baron's War. Pope Innocent got involved as well, absolving the king from having to enforce Magna Carta-not because he'd been forced to sign it, but because it was blasphemous. Under stand, it was a crime against God to suggest that people could question or make demands on the king. The American Revolution can be seen as another Baron's revolt. This time it was the merchant-barons, the rising capitalist class, waging a rebellion against the king and the landed gentry of England. They wanted to take the king and the aristocrats out of the equation, so that the flow of power went God-property owners. When they said "All men are created equal," they meant very specifically white men who owned property. That property included black people, white women, and more generally, the huge pool oflaborers who were needed to turn this continent from a living landbase into private wealth. Less than 5 percent of the population could vote under the constitution as it was originally written. Under the rising Protestant ethic, amassing wealth was a sign of God's favor and God's grace. God was still operable, he'd just switched allegiance from the old inherited powers to the rising mercantile class. This new class had a new set of priorities in the service of their God given right to accumulate wealth. The West has had market economies f thousands of years; they are essential to feeding civilization. Goods or Slide 57: 64 Part I: Resistance have to be traded, first from the countryside, then from the colonies (and there are always colonies) , to fill the ever-growing needs of the bloated power base. (The Sahara Desert once fed the Roman Empire, which should tell you everything you need to know about civilization's hunger and its supporting ecosystem's ultimate fate.) Those original market economies in the West, and, indeed, around the world, were nestled inside a moral economy informed by commu nity networks of care, concern, and responsibilities. Property owners and moneylenders were restricted by community norms and the influ ence of extralegal leaders like elders, healers, and religious officers. This social world was held together by personal bonds of affection and mutual obligation. These were precisely the bonds that the rising cap italist class needed to destroy. Their concept of freedom meant freedom from those obligations and responsibilities. In their schema, individ uals were free from traditional moral and community values, as well as from the king and landed gentry, to pursue their own financial inter ests. What held this social world together wasn't bonds of affection and obligation, but impersonal contracts-and impersonal contracts favored the rich, the employers, the landlords, the owners, and the cred itors while dispossessing the poor, the employees, the tenants , the slaves, and the debtors. In 1776, half the immigrants to America were indentured servants. Three out of four people in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were or had been indentured, 20 percent of the population were slaves, and 10 percent of the population owned half the wealth. George Wash ington was the wealthiest man in America. Groups of people don't endure oppression without some of them fighting back. This is true everywhere, no matter what. There were d huge and fertile populist movements in America at that time, with visions for a true democracy that have yet to be equaled. For instance, the commoners seized control of the Pennsylvania statehouse and wrote the following into their constitution: "An enormous portion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights and destructive of the common happiness of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property." Slide 58: Liberals and Radicals 65 And here are a few ,other facts you probably didn't learn in public school. Between 1675 and 1700, militant confrontations brought down governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. By 1760 there had been eighteen rebellions aimed at overthrowing colonial governments, six black rebellions, and forty major riots. " Freedom from all foreign or domestic oligarchy!" was a slogan of the common people. " Domestic" referred to George Wash ington and his friends, the merchant-barons. People knew who their enemies were-most of them had been literally owned by the rich. Con trast their slogan to the following quote from John Jay, the president of the First Continental Congress and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: "The people who own the country ought to govern it." In fact, common soldiers mounted multiple attacks against the head . quarters of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Nobody was taken in by the government that the merchant-barons were proposing. What the merchant-barons wanted was a centralized national gov ernment with the ability to coercively suppress internal dissent movements, regulate trade, protect private property, and subsidize infra structure that would drive the economy. What they ultimately wanted was to gut a vast, living continent and tum it into wealth, and they didn't want anyone to get in their way. That's the trajectory this culture has been on for IO,OOO years, since the beginning of agriculture. The only thing that has changed is who gets to benefit from that gutting. We need to understand the contradictory legacy of liberalism to understand the left today. Any political idea that can bring down theoc racy, monarchy, and religious fundamentalism is worth considering, but any ideology that impedes a radical transformation of other equally violent systems of power needs to be rigorously examined and ulti mately rejected. Classical liberalism values the sovereignty of the individual, and asserts that economic freedom and property rights are essential to that sovereignty. John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argu ment that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each Slide 59: 66 Part I: Resistance other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by Liberalism VS. Radicalism LIBERAL RADICAL • • Individualism basic social unit is individual person is distinct from social group • Group or Class basic social unit is group person is socially constructed active and critical embrace of group • • • • • Idealism attitudes are sources and solutions for oppression thinking as prime mover of social life rational argument/education is engine of social change • • • Materialism concrete systems of power are sources and solutions of oppression thoughts and ideas are only one part of social life organized political resistance com· pels social change • Naturalism body exists independently of society/mind gender/race as physical body • • Constructivism reality is socially constructed gender/race are socially real categories, but biology is ideology • • Voluntarism social life comprised of autonomous, intentional, self-willed actions • Social Determinism social life is comprised of a complex political determinism the oppressed do not make or control conditions but "with forms of power forged from powerlessnesj, conditions are resisted"' • • • Moralism rightness means conforming behavior to rules that are abstractly right or wrong equality before the law • • Feminist Jurisprudence abstract moralism works in the inter ests of power material equality while powerlessness is the problem, redistribution of power as currently defined is not its ultimate solution • • Slide 60: Liberals and Radicals 67 taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it. Classical liberalism from Locke forward has a contradiction at its center. It believes in human sovereignty as a natural or inalienable right, but only against the power of a monarchy or other civic tyranny. By loosening the ethical constraints that had existed on the wealthy, classical liberalism turned the powerless over to the economically pow erful, simply swapping the monarchs for the merchant-barons. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, provided the ethical justification for unbridled capitalism. As previously discussed, the pur suit of wealth for its own sake had been considered a sin and such pursuit had been constrained by a whole series of societal institutions. But Smith argued that the "Invisible Hand" of the market would pro vide what society needed; any government interference would be detrimental. According to classical liberalism, government needs to refrain from any participation in the economic realm, beyond the enforcement of contracts. Classical liberalism's commitment to civil rights was based on a similar idea of what are termed "negative freedoms." The gov ernment must not interfere in arenas like speech and religion in order to guarantee liberty to individual citizens. The Bill of Rights is essen tially a list of negative freedoms. In the real world, what negative freedoms mean is: if you have the power, you get to keep it. If you own the press or have the money to access it, you're free to "say" whatever you like. If you can't access it, well, the government can't interfere. The vast majority of citizens thus have no right to be heard in any way that is socially meaningful. This is how classical liberalism increased the rights of the powerful against the rights of the dispossessed. In 1880, the growing monopolies of the big trusts (corporations) showed the inevitable end point oflaissez-faire economics. Reformers saw that the government was the only institution that could break the eco nomic stranglehold of the big trusts. Liberal thinkers started to abandon the classical commitment to laissez-faire economics, while they remained committed to individualism and the liberal concept of civil rights. Slide 61: 68 Part I: Resistance The big split between liberals and the true left came in the 1940s: as liberals took up an anti-Communist position, the actual leftists were purged from liberalism, especially from labor unions and the New Deal coalition. From the beginnings of classical liberalism, liberals have embraced capitalism. Indeed, classical liberalism was foundational to a capitalist economy. Hence, unlike in Europe, there is no real left in the U S , as a true left starts with the rejection of capitalism. There is no political party in the U S that represents a critique of capitalism. Con gress is essentially filled with two wings of the Capitalist Party. After the disaster of the Great Depression, liberalism shifted to the idea of government intervention to regulate business in order to assure competition and to enforce safety and labor standards. This was an attempt to make capitalism work, not to dismantle it. This approach is very different from state socialism, in which the state owns (not regu lates) the means of production (and which has produced its own environmental and human rights disasters). This modem version ofliberalism is called social liberalism. It main tained its commitment to civil rights, especially as negative freedoms, and a capitalist system guided by government supports and regulates. At this moment, the liberal basis of most progressive movements is impeding our ability, individually and collectively, to take action. The individualism ofliberalism, and of American society generally, renders too many of us unable to think clearly about our dire situation. Indi vidual action is not an effective response to power because human society is political; by definition it is built from groups, not from indi viduals. That is not to say that individual acts of physical and intellectual courage can't spearhead movements. But Rosa Parks didn't end segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Rosa Parks plus the stalwart determination and strategic savvy of tfte entire black community did. Liberalism also diverges from a radical analysis on the question of the nature of social reality. Liberalism is idealist. This is the belief that reality is a mental activity. Oppression, therefore, consists of attitudes and ideas, and social change happens through rational argument and education. Materialism, in contrast, is the understanding that society is organized by concrete systems of power, not by thoughts and ideas, Slide 62: Liberals and Radicals 89 and that the solution to oppres�ion is to take those systems apart brick by brick. This in no way implies that individuals are exempt from exam ining their privilege and behaving honorably. It does mean that antiracism workshops will never end racism: only political struggle to rearrange the fundamentals of power will. There are three other key differences between liberals and radicals. Because liberalism erases power, it can only explain the subordinate position of oppressed groups through biology or some other claim to naturalism. A radical analysis of race understands that differences in skin tone are a continuum, not a distinction: race as biology doesn't exist. Writes Audrey Smedley in Race in North America: Origin and Evo lution of a Worldview, Race originated as the imposition of an arbitrary value system on the facts of biological (phenotypic) variations in the human species . . . . The meanings had social value but no intrinsic relationship to the biological diversity itself. Race . . . was fab ricated as an existential reality out of a combination of recognizable physical differences and some incontrovertible social facts: the conquest of indigenous peoples, their domi nation and exploitation, and the importation of a vulnerable and controllable population from Africa to service the insa tiable greed of some European entrepreneurs. The physical differences were a major tool by which the dominant whites constructed and maintained social barriers and economic inequalities; that is, they consciously sought to create social stratification based on these visible differences) Her point is that race is about power, not physical differences. Racial izing ideology was a tool of the English against the Irish and the Nazis against the Jews, groups that could not be distinguished by phenotypic differences-indeed, that was why the Jews were forced to wear yellow stars. Conservatives actively embrace biological explanations for race and gender oppression. White liberals usually know better than to claim that people of color are naturally inferior, but without the systematic Slide 63: 70 Part I: Resistance analysis of radicalism, they are stuck with vaguely uncomfortable notions that people of color are just . . . different, a difference that is often fetishized or sexualized, or that results in patronizing attitudes. Gender is probably the ultimate example of power disguised as biology. There are sociobiological explanations for everything from male spending patterns to rape, all based on the idea that differences between men and women are biological, not, as radicals believe, socially created. This naturalizing of political categories makes them almost impossible to question; there's no point in challenging nature or four million years of evolution. It's as useless as confronting God, the right wing bulwark of misogyny and social stratification. The primary purpose of all this rationalization is to try to remove power from the equation. If God ordained slavery or rape, then this is what shall happen. Victimization becomes naturalized. When these forms of "naturalization" are shown to be self-serving rationalizations the fall-back position is often that the victimization somehow is a ben efit to the victims. Today, many of capitalism's most vocal defenders argue that indigenous people and subsistence farmers want to "develop" (oddly enough, at the point of a gun) ; many men argue that women "want it" (oddly enough, at the point of a gun) ; foresters argue that forests (who existed on their own for thousands of years) benefit from their management. With power removed from the equation, victimization looks volun tary, which erases the fact that it is, in fact, social subordination. What liberals don't understand is that 90 percent of oppression is consen sual. As Florynce Kennedy wrote, "There can be no really pervasive system of oppression . . . without the consent of the oppressed."4 This withdraw consent, or that the oppressed are respo�sible for their oppression. All it means is that the powerful-capitalists, white supremacists, colonialists, masculinists-can't stand over vast num bers of people twenty-four hours a day with guns. Luckily for them and depressingly for the rest of us, they don't have to. People withstand oppression using three psychological methods: denial, accommodation, and consent. Anyone on the receiving end of domination learns early in life to stay in line or risk the consequences. does not mean that it is our fault, that the system will crumble if we Slide 64: Liberals and Radicals 71 Those consequences only have to be applied once in a while to be effec tive: the traumatized psyche will then police itself. In the battered women's movement, it's generally acknowledged that one beating a year will keep a woman down. While liberals consider it an insult to be identified with a class or group, they further believe that such an identity renders one a victim. I realize that identity is a complex experience. It's certainly possible to claim membership in an oppressed group but still hold a liberal per spective on one's experience. This was brought home to me while I was stuck watching television in a doctor's waiting room. The show was (supposedly) a comedy about people working in an office. One of the black characters found out that he might have been hired because of an affirmative action policy. He was so depressed and humiliated that he quit. Then the female manager found out that she also might have been ultimately advanced to her position because of affirmative action. She collapsed into depression as well. The emotional narrative was almost impossible for me to follow. Considering what men of color and all women are up against-violence, poverty, daily social derision-affir mative action is the least this society can do to rectify systematic injustice. But the fact that these middle-class professionals got where they were because of the successful strategy of social justice movements was self-evidently understood broadly by the audience to be an insult, rather than an instance of both individual and movement success. Note that within this liberal mind-set it's not the actual material con ditions that victimize-it's naming those unjust conditions in an attempt to do something about them that brings the charge of victim ization. But radicals are not the victimizers. We are the people who believe that unjust systems can change-that the oppressed can have real agency and fight to gain control of the material conditions of their lives. We don't accept versions of God or nature that defend our dom ination, and we insist on naming the man behind the curtain, on analyzing who is doing what to whom as the first step to resistance. The final difference between liberals and radicals is in their approaches to justice. Since power is rendered invisible in the liberal schema, justice is served by adhering to abstract principles. For instance, in the United States, First Amendment absolutism means Slide 65: 72 Part I: Resistance that hate groups can actively recruit and organize since hate speet:h is perfectly legal. The principle of free speech outweighs the material reality of what hate groups do to real human people. recognized and addressed for anything to change. Domination will only be dismantled by taking away the rights of the powerful and redistrib uting social power to the rest of us. People sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. That's women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal dominating hierarchies-including economic ones-are dismantled. There is no better definition of oppression than Marilyn Frye's, from her book not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, it's liberalism applied to For the radicals, justice cannot be blind; concrete conditions must be piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sisters' sweat, but when all The Politics of Reality. She writes, "Oppression is a system of interrelated barriers and forces which reduce, immobilize and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group."5 This is radicalism in one elegant sentence. Oppres siQn is not an attitude, it's about systems of power. One of the harms of abuse, but also consent. its four elements:6 1 . Hierarchy subordination is that it creates not only injustice, exploitation, and . Subordination has also been defined for us. Andrea Dworkin lists Hierarchy means there is "a group on top and a group on the bottom. " The "bottom" group has fewer rights, fewer resources, and i s "held to be inferior. "7 2. Objectification "Objectification occurs when a human being, through social means, is made less than human, turned into a thing or commodity, bought and sold . . . those who can be used as if they are not fully human are no longer fully human in social terms."g 3. Submission " In a condition of inferiority and objectification, submission is usually Slide 66: Liberals and Radicals 73 essential for survival . . . The submission forced on inferior, objectified groups precisely by hierarchy and objectification is taken to be the proof of inherent inferiority and subhuman capacities."9 4. Violence Committed by members of the group on top, violence is "systematic, endemic enough to be unremarkable and normative, usually taken as an implicit right of the one committing the violence."'o All four of these elements work together to create an almost her metically sealed world, psychologically and politically, where oppression is as normal and necessary as air. Any show of resistance is met with a continuum that starts with derision and ends in violent force. Yet resist ance happens, somehow. Despite everything, people will insist on their humanity. Coming to a political consciousness is not a painless task. To over come denial means facing the everyday, normative cruelty of a whole society, a society made up of millions of people who are participating in that cruelty, and if not directly, then as bystanders with benefits. A friend of mine who grew up in extreme poverty recalled becoming politicized during her first year in college, a year of anguish over the simple fact that "there were rich people and there were poor people, and there was a relationship between the two." You may have to face full-on the painful experiences you denied in order to survive, and even the humiliation of your own collusion. But knowledge of oppression starts from the bedrock that subordination is wrong and resistance is possible. The acquired skill of analysis can be psychologically and even spiritually freeing. Once some understanding of oppression is gained, most people are called to action. There are four broad categories of action: legal reme dies, direct action, withdrawal, and spirituality. These categories can overlap in ways that are helpful or even crucial to resistance movements; they can also be diversions that dead-end in despair. Crucial to our dis cussion, none of them are definitively liberal or radical as actions. Slide 67: 74 Part I: Resistance LEGAL REMEDIES Most activist groups are centered around legal remedies to address spe cific harms. This is for a very good reason. As Catharine MacKinnon points out, "Law organizes power." Legislative initiatives and court chal lenges can run the gamut from useless pleading to potential structural change. It's too easy for radicals to dismiss this arena as inherently reformist. Much of it is, of course, and the main purpose of this book is to ask environmentalists to consider approaches beyond the usual distribution, we will need to grapple with the law. The trick is to do this as radicals, which means asking the questions: Does this initiative redistribute power, not just change who is at the top of the pyramid? Does it take away the rights of the oppressors and reestablish the rights of the dispossessed? Does it let people control more of the material con ditions of their lives? Does it name and redress a specific harm? We can stand on the sidelines with a more-radical-than-thou attitude, but attitude will not help a single gasping salmon or incested girl child. This is not a call to behave and ask nicely. I believe in breaking the ' law because the edifice is supported by a federal constitution that upholds a corrupt arrangement of power. It was written by white men who owned white women as chattel and black men and women as slaves, and those powerful men wrote it to protect their power. We have no moral obligation to respect it; quite the opposite. I also believe we will need to bring the whole edifice down or I wouldn't be a coauthor of this book. But there are legislative victories and court rulings-like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Roe legal response. But if we would like to organize power in an egalitarian v. Wade-that have changed people's lives in substantive ways, redirecting the flow of power toward justice. Further, a transition toward direct democracy built on a foun dation of both human rights and human participation in the life of the planet is not conceptually difficult. Law is not just for liberals. The ques tion is, what actions will get us from here to there? Neither sneering nor despairing has ever proven to be effective. It's easy for nothing to be radical enough, but an interior state of rage is also not enough. Structural change needs to happen. A radical analysis starts from that fact. How best to force that change is a strategic question. Slide 68: Liberals and Radicals 75 DIRECT ACTION Other activist groups bypass the legislative arena and focus on direct action. Sometimes this overlaps with a legal approach, such as civil dis obedience to influence legislators and win specific goals. How many women chained themselves to the White House gate or endured the torture of force-feeding in Holloway Prison to win the right to vote? But actionists can also target other institutional arrangements of power, cir cumventing the law entirely. The Montgomery bus boycott is a good example of applying economic instead of political pressure. As with legal remedies, the goal of direct action can be liberal or radical. No single action, whether "inside" or "outside" whatever system of power, is going to be definitive. A serious resistance movement under stands that. I nstead of closing off whole sectors of a power's organization, a successful movement aims at wherever power is vul nerable compared to the resources at hand. The "inside" and the "outside" actionists need to see themselves as working together toward that larger goal. Both are needed. Plenty of "outside" people do nothing effective their entire lives-indeed, a whole subculture of them declare that individual psychological change is a political strategy and attending personal growth workshops is "doing the work." You could hot find a more liberal view. My point here is that "inside" and "outside" the iden tified system are not the bifurcation points of liberals and radicals. A related mistake is in believing the most militant strategy to be the most radical. It isn't; it's only the most militant. I don't say this from a moral attachment to nonviolence. Derrick wrote 900 pages (in Endgame) to refute the pacifist arguments generally accepted across the left, and much of this current book is meant to inspire seriously mili tant action. But we need to examine calls for violence through a feminist lens critical of norms of masculinity. Many militant groups are an excuse for men to wallow in the cheap thrill of the male ego unleashed from social constraints through bigger and better firepower: real men use guns. Combined with ineffective strategic goals, and often rabidly masculinist behavioral norms, these groups can implode when the men start shooting each other. Michael Collins was killed by other Irish nationalists, Trotsky by Stalinist goons, and Malcolm X by other Slide 69: 76 Part I: Resistance black Muslims. Leftist revolutions that used violence have often empowered a charismatic dictator and the next round of atrocities. Socialists and anarchists-many of whom believed in the Soviet Union as the utopian kingdom come-were stunned and appalled by the pact between Stalin and Hitler, and by the subsequent genocidal behavior of Joseph Stalin. Allowing violence to be directed by the wrong hands does nothing to bring down an oppressive system, and, indeed, rein scribes the system called patriarchy. As Theodore Roszak points out, this strand of the male left has taken up "violence as self-actualization." Often tracing its roots to Franz Fanon's The Wretched ofthe Earth, or Jean Paul Sartre's introduction to that book, violence is not just considered as a potential tactic; it's urged as a psychological necessity for the manhood of the oppressed. "At this point," writes Roszak, "things do not simply become ugly; they become stupid. Suddenly the measure of conviction is the efficiency with which one can get into a fistfight with the nearest cop at hand."" This approach is actually no different than that of the workshop hop pers; the goal is a satisfactory internal emotional state (and not a particularly liberatory one) rather than an egalitarian society or the resistance movement needed to get us there. The misogynist entitlement of men on the left was what led to the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s. Women learned to think politi cally in the civil rights movement, the student movement, and the peace movement, and then applied that analysis to their own situation. The behavior of their male comrades was no different from that of men of the establishment-"no less foul , no less repressive, and no less unliberated," as three Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) veterans put it.!2 This was true across the racial spectrum. Former Weatherwoman Cathy Wilkerson said many women dropped out of the antiwar movement altogether because of the sexism: "You couldn't penetrate the left. It was just like a stone wall."!) Writes historian Jeremy Varon, "As part of its infamous 'smash monogamy' campaign, Weatherman mandated the splitting apart of couples, whose affection was deemed impermissibly 'possessive' or even 'selfish'; the forced rotation of sex partners, determined largely by the leadership for reasons both polit ical and, it is alleged, crudely 'personal' (the charge is that some male # Slide 70: Liberals and Radicals 77 leaders essentially shuttled particular women between collectives in order to sleep with them); and even eruptions of group sex in which taboos broke down in variously uncomfortable and exhilarating scenes of libidinal confusion."'4 Exhilaratingf whom? is the question, answered by Varon's under or stated observation that "life in the collectives could be especially difficult for women . . . and also invited the sexual exploitation of female members."" Weather Underground collectives were "psycho logically harsh environments [that] rewarded assertive and even aggressive personalities, while chewing up those less confident or able to defend themselves. " , 6 Even the women's cadres were "driven by a coerced machismo" that, not surprisingly, "encouraged neither true autonomy nor solidarity among the women. " 17 Underground newspapers like the Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and Rat made money from ads that both used imagery of objectified women and sold actual women as sexual commodities. As early as 1 9 6 9 , women a t the Underground Press Syndicate Conference proposed a resolution that "papers should stop accepting commercial advertising that uses women's bodies to sell records and other products, and adver tisements for sex, since the use of sex as a commodity especially oppresses women.",8 Eventually "a particularly violent and pornog raphy-filled issue of Rat, with articles trivializing women's liberation, so enraged the women on the magazine's staff" that they joined in coalition with other feminist groups and took over the magazine. Robin Morgan was a member of the editorial coup. Her foundational article, "Good-Bye To All That," was published in the new Rat, an article filled with justified feelings of rage and betrayal. The New Left looked just like the Old Patriarchy, a problem that has only increased on the left as it has embraced pornography as freedom. Freedom for whom?, To do what?, and To whom? are the dirty little questions that leftist men refused to face. The fact that an entire class of women was kept in con ditions of abuse and servitude utterly contradicted any claim the left could make to defending universal human rights. The leaders of the Black Power movement provided similar examples. Eldridge Cleaver wrote openly of raping black women as "practice" for raping white women.'9 He was eventually arrested and jailed for both. Slide 71: 78 Part I: Resistance Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers and its Minister of Def ense, raped numerous women with the backup of his armed thugs. He is quoted as saying, "There are two kinds of rape. In one version, you simply take a woman's body. In the other, you not only take her body, you try to make her enjoy being raped. "20 He was arrested for embezzling money from the Black Panther's education and nutrition program, and he was convicted of embezzling money from a Panther school. probably to fund his drug habit. Newton was also tried twice for the murder of a seventeen-year-old prostituted girl, Kathleen Smith. Malcolm X wasn't much better. He was a batterer and a pimp with a hateful attitude to les bian women before converting to Islam. Afterward, he instituted his male which, like all fundamentalist religions, gave men the ultimate ideolog ical reassurance that dominating women was God's plan. It is important to note that at the time, and continuing to the present day, there were and are men and women of all races who rejected this behavior as exploitative and unacceptable. The radical Puerto Rican group, the Young Lords, stands as a great example. Originally, the group had an all-male leadership and a point in their platform that stated, " Machismo must be revolutionary." I ris Morales remembers, Men in leadership were abusing their authority and women recruits would come in and the men would be sleeping around with them. They'd be sleeping with two and three women, of course, they were mucho machos and thought this was really cool. They pulled out their list to compare who had the most conquests, and we were outraged, the women were # supremacist ideology in the guidelines for black Muslim family life, outraged." The women began meeting without men in their own caucus and came up with a list of demands. These included promoting women to . leadership positions, child care at meetings, and including women in the defense ministry. They found support among the more progressive men because "they understood that without women you can't have a revolution."" Over an amazing six months, all ten of their demands were met, even the adoption of the slogan "Abajo con Machismo! " ( Down with Machismo! ) . Feminism was taken s o seriously that "almost Slide 72: Liberals and Radicals 79 every single central committee member was demoted for male chau vinism and they had to change their way of being, even the chairman of the organization."'3 The men even started their own caucus to dis cuss issues of machismo. This transformation was documented in Morales's film jPalante Siempre Palante/'4 Morales also speaks of "the sad story of the movement," a story replayed into heartbreak across so many movements. "There were one or two women who shunned us altogether. And they later emerge on the backs of the movement we had fought for. This is an important lesson because not every woman is my sister and not every Puerto Rican is my sister."25 Solidarity with each other is such a precious com modity, often harder to come by than public courage against the oppressor. Attacking each other is doing his work for him. Similarly, Norm R. Allen Jr. coined the phrase " Reactionary Black Nationalism" to describe the "bigotry, intolerance, hatred, sexism [and] homophobia" that he urged the black community to reject.26 Mark Anthony Neal's New Black Man stands as an engaging template of moral agency and community building in the face of both oppression (he's African American) and privilege (he's also heterosexual and a man). Even in this short discussion, the complexity of the issue of violence becomes apparent. It's understandable that people who care about jus tice want to reject violence; many of us are survivors of it, and we know all too well the entitled psychology of the men who used it against us. And whatever our personal experiences, we can all see that the violence of imperialism, racism, and misogyny has created useless destruction and trauma over endless, exhausting millennia. There are good rea sons that many thoughtful people embrace a nonviolent ethic. "Violence" is a broad category and we need to be clear what we're talking about so that we can talk about it as a movement. I would urge the following distinctions: the violence of hierarchy vs. the violence of self-defense, violence against people vs. violence against property, and the violence as self-actualization vs. the violence for political resistance. It is difficult to find someone who is against all of these. When clari fied in context, the abstract concept of "violence" breaks down into distinct and concrete actions that need to be judged on their own Slide 73: 80 Part I: Resistance merits. It may be that in the end some people will still reject all cate gories of violence; that is a prerogative we all have as moral agents. But solidarity is still possible, and is indeed a necessity given the serious ness of the situation and the lateness of the hour. Wherever you personally fall on the issue of violence, it is vital to understand and accept its potential usefulness in achieving our collective radical and feminist goals. Violence of Hierarchy vs. Violence of Self-Defense The violence of hierarchy is the violence that the powerful use against the dispossessed to keep them subordinated. As an example, the vio lence committed for wealth is socially invisible or committed at enough of a distance that its beneficiaries don't have to be aware of it. This type of violence has defined every imperialist war in the history of the U S that has been fought to get access to " natural resources" for corpora tions to turn into the cheap consumer goods that form the basis of the American way of life. People who fight back to defend themselves and their land are killed. No one much notices. The powerful have armies, courts, prisons, and taxation on their side. They also own the global media, thus controlling not j ust the information but the entire dis course. The privileged have the "comforts or elegancies" (as one def ender of slavery put it) to which they feel God, more or less, has enti tled them, and the luxury to remain ignorant. 27 The entire structure of global capitalism runs on violence (Violence: The Other Fossil Fuel? ) . The violence used b y the powerful to keep their hierarchy i n place i s one manifestation that w e can probably agree is wrong. In contrast stands the violence of self-defense, a range of actions taken up by people being hurt by an aggressor. Everyone has the right to def end her or his lif or person against an attacker. Many leftists extend e this concept of self-defense to the right to collective defense as a people. For example, many political activists supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, even taking personal risks in solidarity work like building schools and harvesting coffee. Indeed some people refuse to call this collective self-def ense "violence," defining violence as only those brutal acts that support hierarchy. I believe it is more honest to call this vio lence, and accept that not all violence is equal, or equally bad. # Slide 74: Liberals and Radicals 81 Violence against Property vs. Violence against People Again, some people reject that violence is the correct word to describe property destruction. Because physical objects cannot feel pain, they argue, tools like spray paint and accelerants can't be considered weapons and their use is not violent. I think the distinction between sensate beings and insensate objects is crucial. So is property destruc tion violent or nonviolent? This question is both pragmatic-we do need to call it something-and experiential. Destroying property can be done without harming a single sentient being and with great effect to stop an unjust system. Can anyone really argue against the French resistance blowing up railroad tracks and bridges to stop the Nazis? But violence against property can also be an act meant to intimidate. This is the source of the unease that many progressives and radicals may feel toward property destruction. If you have been a person so threatened, you know how effective it is. Indeed, if violence against property were an ineffective approach to instilling fear and compliance, no one would ever use it. Burning a cross on someone's lawn is meant to traumatize and terrorize. So is smashing all the dinner plates to the floor. A friend who survived a right-wing terrorist attack on the building where she worked was later hospitalized with severe PTS D (posttrau matic stress disorder) . Property destruction can have a crippling effect on sentient beings. Whatever we decide to call property destruction, we need to weigh the consequences and strategic benefits and make our decisions from there. Again, "violence" is not a bad word, only a descriptive one. Obvi ously, many more people can accept an attack against a window, a wall, or an empty building than can accept violence against a person, and that's as it should be. But wherever you stand personally on this issue, basic respect for each other and for our movement as a whole demands that we acknowledge the distinction between people and property when we discuss violence. Violence as Self-Actualization vs. Violence for Political Resistance Male socialization is basic training for life in a military hierarchy. The psychology of masculinity is the psychology required of soldiers, demanding control, emotional distance, and a willingness and ability to Slide 75: 82 Part I: Resistance dominate. The subject of that domination is a negative reference group, an " Other" that is objectified as subhuman. I n patriarchy, the first group that boys learn to despise is girls. Franz Fanon quotes (uncriti cally, of course) a young Algerian militant who repeatedly chanted, " I am not a coward, I am not a woman, I am not a traitor."28 No insult is worse than some version of "girl, " usually a part of female anatomy warped into hate speech. With male entitlement comes a violation imperative: men become men by breaking boundaries, whether it's the sexual boundaries of women, the cultural boundaries of other peoples, the physical bound aries of other nations, the genetic boundaries of species, or the biological boundaries of ecosystems. For the entitled psyche, the only reason " No" exists is because it's a sexual thrill to force past it. As Robin Morgan poignantly describes the situation of Tamil women, To the women, the guerillas and the army bring disaster. They complain that both sets of men steal, loot, and molest women and girls. They hate the government army for doing this, but they're terrified as well of the insurgent forces ostensibly fighting to free them. Of their own Tamil men, one says wearily, " I f the boys come back, we will have the same experi ence all over again. We want to be left in peace. "29 Eldridge Cleaver announced, "We shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it. " This is a lose-lose proposition for the planet, of course, and for the women and children who stand in the way of such masculine necessity. Or as the Viet namese say, when the elephants fight, it's the grass thit suffers. As we can see from these examples, whether from a feminist under standing or from a peace perspective, the concern that taking up violence could potentially be individually and culturally dangerous is a valid one. Many soldiers are permanently marked by war. Homeless shelters are peopled by vets too traumatized to function. Life-threat ening situations leave scars, as do both committing and surviving atrocities. But violence is a broad category of action; it can be wielded destruc- Slide 76: Liberals and Radicals 83 tively or wisely. We can decide when property destruction is acceptable, against which physical targets, and with what risks to civilians. We can decide whether direct violence against people is appropriate. We can build a resistance movement and a supporting culture in which atroc ities are always unacceptable; in which penalties for committing them are swift and severe; in which violence is not glorified as a concept but instead understood as a specific set of actions that we may have to take up, but that we will also set down to return to our communities. Those are lines we can inscribe in our culture of resistance. That culture will have to include a feminist critique of masculinity, a good grounding in the basics of abuse dynamics, and an understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder. We will have to have behavioral norms that shun abusers instead of empowering them, support networks for prisoners, aid for combatants struggling with PTS D, and an agreement that anyone who has a history of violent or abusive behavior needs to be kept far away from serious underground action. Underground groups should do an "emotional background check" on potential recruits. Like substance abuse, personal or relational violence should disqualif that y recruit. First and foremost, we need a movement made of people of character where abusers have no place. Second, the attitudes that create an abuser are at their most basic level about entitlement. A recruit with that personality structure will almost certainly cause problems when the actionists need sacrifice, discipline, and dependability. Men who are that entitled are able to justify almost any action. If they're com f ortable committing atrocities against their intimates and families, it will be all too easy for them to behave badly when armed or otherwise in a position of power, committing rape, torture, or theft. We need our combatants to be of impeccable character for our public image, for the efficacy of our underground cells , and for the new society we're trying to build. "Ours is not a war for robbery, not to satisfy our passions, it is a struggle for freedom," Nat Turner told his recruits, who committed no atrocities and stole only the supplies that they needed. Only people with a distaste for violence should be allowed to use it. Empowering psychopaths or reinscribing the dominating masculinity of global patriarchy are mistakes we must avoid. A very simple question to ask as we collectively and individually con- Slide 77: 84 Part I: Resistance sider serious actions like property destruction is, is this action tactically sound? Does it advance our goal of saving the planet? Or does it simply answer an emotional need to do something, to feel something? I have been at demonstrations where young men smashed windows of mom and pop grocery stores and set fire to random cars in the neighborhood. This is essentially violence as a form of self-expression-f a very enti or tled self. Such random acts of destruction against people who are not the enemy have no place in our strategy or in our culture. It's especially the job of men to educate other men about our collective rejection of masculinist violence. WITHDRAWAL Another response to conditions of oppression is withdrawal. With drawal encompasses a vast range of possible actions. On one end of the spectrum are acts of personal detachment or refusal carried out by alienated individuals. Entire social enclaves-the inheritors of the Bohemian tradition-are filled with such people. Their goal is not to make broad-based social or political change, but to live "authentically. " We can see the potential problem with this strategy in some synonyms for the word "withdrawal": abandonment, abdication, disengagement, marooning, resignation, retirement. On the other end of the spectrum is withdrawal used as a political tactic, targeting specific economic, political, or social practices or insti tutions. As with legal remedies and direct action, this can be a radical-and successful-attempt to win liberty. It can also dead-end into political irrelevance and horizontal hostility. Horizontal hostility, a phrase coined by Florynce Kennedy in 1970,30 descrjbes the destruc tion that happens when oppressed groups fight amongst themselves instead of fighting back against the powerful ( Figure 3-1). It's a pre- . dictable behavior, and one against which we must guard. A strategy of withdrawal risks exacerbating this tendency for the obvious reason that if you close off the possibility of fighting up the pyramid of hierarchy, the only people left to fight are each other. The main difference between withdrawal as a successful strategy and withdrawal as a f ailed strategy is whether the withdrawal is linked Slide 78: Liberals and Radicals 85 to political resistance or instead seen as adequate in itself. This differ ence often hinges exactly on the distinction between the liberal and the radical. Remember that liberalism is idealist; it conceptualizes society as made up of ideas, not material institutions. Therefore, a strategy of simply withdrawing loyalty from the dominant system, of individual psychological, intellectual, or cultural positioning, is believed by lib erals to be revolutionary. While issues of identification and loyalty are crucial to building the class consciousness needed for a resistance movement, this alone is not enough. The withdrawal has got to go beyond the intellectual, the emotional, and the psychological to include a goal of actually winning justice. "Worlds within worlds" may give solace, but ultimately they change nothing. We need to guard against these impulses, as seductive as they are. The idea that all we have to do is turn our attention to ourselves and our chosen community is appealing, but such actions will never be enough. Divorced from a larger goal ofliberty and a strategy of direct confrontations with power, "withdrawn" communities end up irrelevant at best, and unpleasant places toxic with personal criticisms and cultlike elements at worst. Often, the "withdrawalists" set withdrawal and direct confrontations with power in opposition to each other as strategies, rather than seeing the former as a necessary element for the latter. But living in a rarified bubble-world of the converted is a poor substitute for freedom-and such a world will certainly not save the planet. The distinction between that we are devoting an entire chapter to it. f IgUre 3-1: Horizontal Hostil� a merely alternative culture and a culture of resistance is so important • Power t Resistance _ bQ GQ GTSo'l4lrity' � /Dn� �/HUZUh' S,IlttHi �ti� G " Q>..�..X"G X" X , ....t. ,.,u! 'U' No Resistance • Power \ Hori��ntal Hostility Slide 79: 86 Part I: Resistance For now, a positive example for study is the American Revolution. The colonists' original strategy was one of withdrawal, which employed: • identificational withdrawal and the subsequent creation of new personal loci of loyalties to the American colonies as opposed to the British crown; • economic withdrawal and boycotts of everything from tea to wool; cultural withdrawal and the valuing of American art, prod ucts, and sensibilities; political withdrawal, built around the colonial court system and state- and colony-wide congresses for governance. • • All of these forms of withdrawal came together in a culture of resistance that created, encouraged, and supported the revolution. People began to conceive of themselves as citizens of their state and ultimately of those states united. They also took on new political iden tities as patriots, as " Sons of Liberty," rather than sons and daughters of England. These politicized self-definitions merged with cultural and economic withdrawal. The United States is singular as an ex-British colony .that is a nation of coffee drinkers, not tea drinkers . This is a direct result of the colonial resistance to the tax on tea, still mythologized in the Boston Tea Party. No patriot drank tea, and the Sons of Liberty were willing to take the necessary measures to make sure no one else did either. Some background history of the era may be necessary to the dis cussion. The British Constitution granted that taxation on British subjects could only be by consent of the people. That fonsent was seen to dwell in Parliament as the representative of the people. This concept was carried forward in the US Constitution, which states that only the US Congress has the power to tax, not the president. Samuel Adams wrote that to be taxed without representation was to be reduced "from the character of free Subjects to the miserable state of tributary Slaves." The insult of British taxation was felt all the more keenly because the colonists had representation in their own state assemblies, which they believed were the proper governing bodies for taxation. Slide 80: Liberals and Radicals 87 Local uprisings-what would now be considered mob violence were common throughout England and across the colonies because there was no police force in the eighteenth century. Since the Middle Ages, the government depended on institutions like "hue and cry, " where lawbreakers would be apprehended by the community at large. By the eighteenth century, the preferred method was the posse commi tatus, in which the magistrate or sheriff was empowered to call up as many able-bodied men as might be needed. The next line of defense was the militia. Explains historian Pauline Maier, " Both the posse and the militia drew upon local men, including many of the same persons who participated in extralegal uprisings. This meant that insurrections could naturally assume the manner of a lawful institution, as insur gents acted by habit with relative restraint and responsibility.")' What it also meant was that if the population at large was sympa thetic to a cause or directly involved in a disturbance, the local magistrate was left "virtually helpless."32 This happened repeatedly throughout the period leading up to the Revolutionary War as a groundswell of people felt their rights outraged by British policies. The Stamp Act was in many ways the beginning of organized resist ance. The act was passed by Parliament in 176S to help pay for the Seven Years' War. Most official documents, like court records and land grants, and printed materials, like broadsheets and newspapers, had to carry a stamp, and the stamps cost money. The act was despised throughout the colonies, and colonial legislatures sent letters of protest back to England. But more important was the Stamp Act Congress. This was the first collective colony-wide effort to make common cause against Britain. Local groups opposed to the Stamp Act also created committees of correspondence, a network of activists that spanned the thirteen colonies. These committees proved crucial in providing the political infrastructure required to form the revolutionary movement that followed. According to Richard Bushman, "The network of activists meant that revolutionary language by 1773 was sounding in virtually every adult ear in Massachusetts, and that there was a fluid continuum of discourse joining the Boston press and town meeting and the talk in meetings and taverns through the Province." ll The Stamp Act was never enforced because of the resistance efforts Slide 81: 88 Part I: Resistance of the common people. Those efforts largely took the form of property destruction and threats of bodily harm. The stamps required distribu tors, an official person responsible for their sale. Those officials were the leverage point, the easily identified target to stop the dreaded stamps. Street protests swelled in Boston, and then quickly spread to neighboring colonies. The distributors were hanged, burned, and/or beheaded in effigy. The mob then moved on to the distributor's house, which would be evicted of its residents and then looted or pulled to pieces. Often the distributor would be forced to resign from the duty publicly. As a result, no one could be found who would take up the job. According to Maier, "The solution was infectious. Without distributors the Stamp Act could not go into effect, so the coercion of stampmen seemed rational, even efficient. "H The Massachusetts stamp distributor resigned on August 15th, 1765. On August 29th, Rhode I sland's fol lowed suit, and the strategy proved so successful that the rest fell in line with alacrity. The last distributor was from Georgia, and he had to be sent from England. On reaching the U S , resigning was his first and only official act. By March 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed because it was simply unenforceable. Boycotts against British goods were strengthened into a formal agree ment called the Continental Association. The Association, as it .was known, wrote a fourteen-point document, the Articles of Association, which was a pact between the colonies to resist British infringement on colonial rights. Its main goal was a broad-scale boycott. To quote from the document, "a non-importation, non-consumption, and non-expor tation agreement, faithfully adhered to, will prove the most speedy, effectual, and peaceable measure." The ban on tea proved especially so. The fascinating point is that the Association h �d no power of enforcement. Unlike the Crown, they could not arrest, fine, or jail offenders. Offenders could only be named and shamed in print and socially ostracized as "the enemies of American liberty. " According to Walter H . Conser, et al. . If colonial merchants violated popular sentiments b y contin uing to import boycotted goods, people not only refused to buy from them but also to talk with them, to sit with them in Slide 82: Liberals and Radicals 89 church, or to sell them goods of any kind. At times, colonial activists conducted regular business in violation of British law by using documents without required tax stamps, by settling legal disputes without courts, and by sending protest petitions to England without the permission of royal governors. They organized and served on local, county, and province commit tees designed to extend, support, and enforce resistance. In 1774 and 1775 , many of these bodies assumed governmental powers on their own initiative, acting as extralegal authorities with powers greater than the remnants of colonial government.35 The Association tried to address the economic hardship that the colonies were sure to endure because of the boycott. Toward that end, they sought to "encourage frugality, economy, and industry, and pro mote agriculture, arts and the manufactures of this country, especially that of wool." Some provincial conventions thought through the eco nomic implications and tried to encourage the manufacture of the following: "woolens, cottons, flannel, blankets, rugs, hosiery, coarse cloths, all sorts of dyes , flax, hemp, salt, saltpeter, gunpowder, nails, wire, steel, paper, glass, copper products, and malt liquors." Massa chusetts added "tin plates, firearms, and buttons. "36 Conser, et aI., explain that The real work of the resistance was often carried on in villages and towns, in the country as well as the city, by forgotten patriots. These now nameless men and women were the people who spun, wove, and wore homespun cloth, who united in the boycott of British goods, and who encouraged their neighbors to join them and stand firm. Many came together in crowd actions and mass meetings to protest and served on, or supported, local resistance committees. They refused to obey the statutes and officers of the British Crown, which so short a time before had been the law of the land. It was these various acts of resistance and noncooperation that struck most openly at the authority of the Crown)? Slide 83: 90 Part I: Resistance Patriots also refused to quarter troops, published newspapers without the required stamps, and continued to run government bodies that the British declared dissolved. The situation escalated in Massachusetts. With the Massachusetts Government Act, Parliament essentially wrested control of both gov erning bodies and the judiciary from the citizens. The first provision declared that judges were to be appointed by the governor, himself appointed by the Crown, instead of by the council, which had been under the control of the people. This was to take effect August I, 1774. What happened instead has been called the first American Revolution)8 The patriots of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the seat of Berkshire County, "proposed a new and more direct method for opposing British policy: Why not close down the courts? Since the weight of govern mental authority was experienced most directly and frequently through the judicial system, closing the courts would effectively bring the Mas sachusetts Government Act to a halt."J9 The Pittsfield Committee of Correspondence circulated the strategy. Boston soon replied, "We acknowledge ourselves deeply indebted to your wisdom . . . . Nothing in our opinion could be better concerted than the measures come into by your County to prevent the Court's sitting."4o The Berkshire County Court never opened again until the United States was an independent nation. On August 1 6 , 1,500 unarmed patriots-farmers, artisans, small business owners-took over the courthouse. As one witness described it, "The Sheriff commanded them to make way for the court; but they gave him to understand that they knew no court or any other establishment than the ancient laws and usages of their country, & to none other would they submit or give way on any terms. "41 The scene was repeated throughout the state. Anyone who had agreed to officiate as judge or magistrate was liable to face social shunning and intimidation at church, at home, and on the street by crowds that reached into the thousands , until they resigned, often in public and in print. Most of these encounters were restrained and even respectful. According to historian Ray Raphael, These citizens took special care to distance themselves from any intimations that they might be a "mob." In their view, they Slide 84: Liberals and Radicals 91 acted like model citizens. The crowd conducted all its business according to strict democratic principles: ad hoc delegates were elected to conduct negotiations, while all decisions were put to a vote of the entire body. There were no "leaders" empowered to issue orders from aboveY Indeed, the crowds were so orderly some of them voted on whether to raise a cheer on the Sabbath. Wrote observer Abigail Adams, " I t being Sunday evening i t passed i n the negative. "4J Their strategy of withdrawal-economic, political, and identifica tional-<:reated a true culture of resistance that successfully supported acts of further resistance. Writes Raphael, "While a group of renowned lawyers, merchants, and slave-owning planters were meeting as a Con tinental Congress in Philadelphia to consider whether or not they should challenge British rule, the plain farmers and artisans of Mas sachusetts, guarding their liberties jealously and voting at every turn, wrested control from the most powerful empire on earth."44 By the time the shot heard 'round the world was fired, the Crown had already lost control of the colony. The Red Coats' march to Lexington was a last ditch effort to gain control of the weapons. Now, contrast the colonial revolutionary movement to the current strategy proposed by many of the leaders of the radical environmental movement. There is much to learn from these people, some of whom are also kind and caring individuals, and all of whom are courageous in their insistence on telling the truth to a public virulent with ignorance. We agree on basic values of justice, compassion, and sustainability, on the horrors wrought by human entitlement, and on the fact that both a reduction of human population and the end of industrial civilization are inevitable. Where we disagree is on the idea of resistance. Daniel Quinn, for instance, explains in a very accessible way why civilization is unsus tainable and based on exploitation. He is very clear that we humans are in for a very ugly time in the next few decades, and for the 200 species we are driving extinct every day there is no time left. The main strategy he proposes, however, is withdrawal, which he calls "walking away. " To where? Well, there's no actual place that he has Slide 85: 92 Part I: Resistance in mind, but rather a state of mind. This would be like the Massa chusetts patriots deciding they could have freedom in their heads while actual freedom from unjust taxation, corrupt courts, nonde mocratic government, billeted soldiers, press gangs, and economic exploitation weren't important or even achievable. The people of colo nial America withdrew, but their withdrawal went well beyond a reframing of their intellectual and emotional loyalties. They engaged in acts of direct confrontation with power, to withdraw from the eco nomic and political institutions that created their subordination. In the end, their withdrawal was so successful that it resulted in a war, though some historians argue that independence could have been won with the continued nonviolent techniques used to such great effect in Massachusetts.45 Quinn is worth quoting because his viewpoint is widely reflected across much of the left: Because revolution in our culture has always represented an attack on hierarchy, it has always meant upheaval-literally a heaving up from below. But upheaval has no role to play in moving beyond civilization. If the· plane is in trouble, you don't shoot the pilot, you grab a parachute and jump. To overthrow the hierarchy is pointless; we just want to leave it behind.46 The metaphor of a plane in trouble is a bad fit to the situation the planet is facing. A more apt comparison would be a maniac with his finger two inches and closing above the red button. Would anyone really argue that "walking away" would be the order of the day? To reframe the airplane image to the current crisis, the planet has to be included. Yet Quinn writes the planet out of th� equation: When we talk about saving the world, what world are we talking about? Not the globe itself, obviously. But also not the biological world-the world of life. The world of life, strangely enough, is not in danger (though thousands and perhaps even millions of species are). Even at our worst and most destruc tive, we would be unable to render this planet lifeless. At Slide 86: Liberals and Radicals 93 present it's estimated that as many as two hundred species a day are becoming extinct, thanks to us. If we continue to kill off our neighbors at this rate, there will inevitably come a day when one of those two hundred species is our own . . . . Saving the world can only mean one thing: saving the world as a human habitat.47 First, humans can render this planet lifeless. A nuclear war could do it. So could the "methane burp" released by the melting of the Arctic tundra; our planet could soon be too hot to support life. But second, and more importantly, why aren't those 200 species a day worth fightingf From the tiny snails building their perfect homes of or? logarithmic spirals to the great bears majestic with maternal rage, why don't the lives of these creatures provoke a ferocious tenderness of pro tection and solidarity? Why are they only valued as human "habitat" ? I have heard variations o n this position repeated everywhere: we can't kill the planet; species loss is regrettable but inevitable; the best we can do is learn about permaculture so that me and mine might have some food when the crash arrives. I find this position morally repre hensible at a level that can't be argued, only mourned. Surely somewhere in the human heart empathy, loyalty, and love are still alive. What is the meaning otherwise of that heart-or is a pump for oxygen all we have left of ourselves? Pretend instead that Quinn's plane is stocked with nuclear weapons-enough to kill every living creature on the planet-and the pilot intends to use them. Killing the pilot then becomes the urgent moral necessity of this thought experiment. We have examples from recent events. The people on board the fourth plane in the September I I attacks realized that the plane was intended as a weapon. They were dead anyway; their duty became to bring that plane down before it could be used to hurt anyone else. That is the situation we are in, on a massive scale, and life on Earth is at stake, 200 species at a time. Parachuting out to save only ourselves should not be the goal of a political movement worth the name, even if there were a safe place to which parachuting was possible. QUinn's only other strategy is education about the nature of civi- Slide 87: 94 Part I: Resistance lization: "Teach a hundred people what you've learned here and urge each of them to teach a hundred. "48 As we have already seen, this is a deeply liberal understanding of social change. Certainly radicals believe in the strategic necessity of education, but that education is toward a goal of transforming material conditions of socially sanctioned subor dination to material conditions of justice. This book, for instance, is an attempt at education, but it's ultimately a call for direct confrontations with power. Quinn continues , " I know that nothing changes unless people's minds change first. You can't change a society by passing new laws-unless people see the necessity for new laws."49 This statement is ignorant to the point of being bizarre. From the Thirteenth Amend ment, to the Civil Rights Act of 1 9 64, to antistalking, antirape, and sexual harassment laws, to the Clean Water Act, laws have profoundly changed society by forcing people to change their behavior, and pro viding for consequences when they don't. Further, leaving laws out of the picture entirely, Georg Elser nearly stopped World War I I all by him self. He did this neither by educating nor by changing laws, but by attempting to assassinate Hitler. He tried to change material condi tions, not hearts and minds, and very nearly saved tens of millions of lives. A related concept is the "lifeboat" idea, proposed by Richard Hein berg. Heinberg has probably done more than anyone to raise awareness about peak oil and resource depletion. His work is cogent, compelling, and compassionate. Where we differ is on the necessity of resistance. He proposes the "lifeboat" as an option for action, which he defines as "the path of community solidarity and preservation."50 This would include learning basic survival skills for food production and other necessities; preserving scientific, historic, and cultural knowledge; and (re) developing social norms for democratic decisio� making. These tasks are all necessary, and indeed make up a large part of our concept of a culture of resistance, as well as a great deal of our hope for the best case scenarios. But as with Quinn, it's not enough. These activities have to be linked to both theoretical and public defense of resistance, and material support for actionists. To return to colonial Massachusetts as an example, the farmers already had basic survival skills, were inheri tors of the knowledge of their time, and had strong local democracies Slide 88: Liberals and Radicals 95 in place. None of this alone stopped the British from subjugating them. That required resistance. But Heinberg doesn't believe that resistance to industrial culture is possible or advisable. He writes, " Efforts to try to bring industrialism to ruin prematurely seem to be pointless and wrongheaded; ruin will come soon enough on its own. Better to invest time and effort in personal and community preparedness. "51 I don't know why he thinks saving our relations-our parents and grandpar ents of plants and mycorrhizae, our cousins and siblings of birds and beasts-is pointless or wrongheaded. What indeed, in the whole his tory of human endeavor, could have more value than saving life itself? And ruin has already come to the Western black rhino and the Carolina parakeet. How many others have j oined them in the forever of extinc tion since you started reading this book? We can also contrast this fatalistic attitude with that of members of the German resistance to Hitler. After the Allied invasion of France, members of the resistance considered whether to call off their attempts to stop the Nazis; the war was lost, and the regime would be destroyed in any case. Yet they decided to risk their lives, and hundreds were tor tured for their actions. They took those risks because, as Henning von Tresckow said, " Every day, we [the Germans] are assassinating nearly 16,000 additional victims." This is not so much math as a grim moral equation, and the resistance chose to try and save those lives. Note well what von Tresckow also said, " How will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?" Future history will judge us just as surely, if anything that could be called a future survives our lack of courage against this criminal culture. I will be the first to admit that we are up against a system of vast power, global in scale, with no sympathetic population upon which to draw for either combatants or support. Still, if illiterate farmers armed only with pitchforks could face off against the most powerful empire that had ever existed-and win-surely we can aim higher than a goal of simply creating really great gardens. Slide 89: 96 Part I: Resistance SPI RITUALITY A withdrawalist stance is often a mixture of liberalism and despair. Lib eralism can only offer individual solutions; despair threatens no solution. Systems of oppression like capitalism and patriarchy can feel overwhelming in their scale and sadism. The promise of withdrawal that a strategy of personal change can compound into political change-is understandably appealing, especially because it often comes with a set of directives that, if not always easy, are at least simple. Indeed, a whole life-including an identity--can be built around these actions. Thus, it is an answer to despair, but it's an answer that relies on faith, not on strategy-which is to say it's an emotional solution and not a material one. We have got to think past our emotional needs. Faith-based solutions can't stand up to intellectual scrutiny. When questioned, the adherents feel threatened and must retreat to the protection of repeatable plati tudes and the reassuring company of like-minded others. This is the stance taken across much of the progressive community. And currently, there is a whole subculture of withdrawalists who have achieved true millenarianism. Millenarianism is "any religious movement that predicts the collapse of the world order as we know it, with its replacement by the millennium, or period of justice, equality, salvation, etc. Millenarian movements are thought to be an extreme example of the use of religion as a 'way out' or reaction to social stress and its resulting anomie."52 The worst historic case of millenarianism was the cattle-killing cult of the Xhosa people. The Xhosa are a cattle-herding people who were living in eastern South Africa when the Dutch arrived in the mid-1600s. Their first encounter with Europeans was in the early 170os. The century that followed was filled with the predictable displacement, resistance, and war. Along with those stressors, a lung disease spread through the Xhosa's cattle in 1854, leaving people even more vulnerable. In April of 1 8 5 6 , a fifteen-year-old girl named Nongqawuse had a spiritual vision in which she was told that the Xhosa should kill their cattle, raze their crops, dump their food stores, and destroy their garden and kitchen tools. If these things were done, the dead would return; tI Slide 90: Liberals and Radicals 97 sickness and old age would disappear; food would spring from the earth; fat, fertile cattle would materialize; and "the whole community will rise from the dead" to drive out the British.53 The story of the prophecy spread quickly. The Xhosa chief, Sarhili, was converted, and ordered the killing of the cattle. As the prophecy picked up speed, other people began to have visions, seeing the dead rising from the sea or hanging in the air. This encouraged more destruc tion of food stores and cattle. So many cattle were killed that the carrion birds couldn't keep up and the carcasses rotted. In total, 400,000 beasts were slaughtered. The Xhosa built bigger and better corrals for the promised new cattle and giant skin bags for their milk in preparation. The first prophesized deadline came and went with no fulfillment. The date was moved. Still nothing. With that much psychological investment, the people's response was predictable: the problem was with the unbelievers. The few cattle left to provide for immediate needs had to be killed. They were, and still no miracle happened. Mass star vation ensued, with the attendant atrocities and cannibalism. People ate animal food, they ate grass, they ate their own children. The believers never gave up their belief, they simply blamed the skeptics. Between starvation and attendant diseases, the population collapsed f rom 105,000 to 26,000. Many of the survivors were forced to migrate. One hundred fifty years of imperialism couldn't destroy the Xhosa, but two years of millenarian fever nearly did. From a different continent comes a related example, the Righteous Harmony Society Movement, also known as the Boxer Rebellion. They were a secret religious society in northern China who believed that a combination of martial arts, diet, and prayer would give them the power to fly and protection against bullets and swords. They also believed that an army of heavenly "spirit soldiers" would drive out for eigners. Bad flooding and drought conditions had created both hardship and starvation for farmers and refugees, and desperate people make good converts. The overarching context, of course, was British imperialism and the escalating exploitation and humiliation of the Opium Wars, forced trade, and the loss of Hong Kong. The Righteous Harmony Society ( R H S ) members were able to scapegoat both Chinese Christians and European Christian mission- Slide 91: 98 Part I: Resistance aries for the famine. The scapegoating culminated in the Taiyuan Mas sacre, in which the Boxers killed over 1 8,000 Chinese Christians. I n June o f 1900, Righteous Harmony Society fighters massed i n Beijing to lay siege to foreign embassies. The siege of the Legation Quarter resulted ultimately in the arrival of an international force (six European nations plus Russia and Japan) of over 20,000 troops, called the Eight Nation Alliance, which ended the siege, occupied Beijing, and forced the Qing court to make reparations. The soldiers of most of the eight nations behaved abominably, looting and raping with the encourage ment of their commanders; once again, it was the grass that suffered. The point, for our purposes, is that the members of the RH S were not assisted by "spirit soldiers," couldn't fly, and had no immunity to bullets. Thousands of people wanted to believe it, but believing only brought useless atrocities and their own deaths. Millenarian cults spring up with regularity even among people not enduring the stress of displacement and genocide. The Millerites, for instance, believed in the Second Coming of Christ and set the date a number of times. It built into a mania. People didn't plant crops, they broke up their furniture, and they gave away their valuables. Alas, what followed was called the Great Disappointment-Christ didn't arrive. The Seventh Day Adventists, not disappointed enough, grew out of the Millerites. They believe that Christ's coming is imminent but wisely refrain from picking a date. Jehovah's Witnesses, another descendant of the Millerites, picked a succession of dates: 1874, 1 878, 1881, 1910, 1 9 14, 1920, 1925 . . . World War I I was interpreted as Armageddon to the point that people put off dental work and lived with the pain, so strong was their belief that they would soon be taken to heaven. Writes one former member, "To this day, I associate the fragrance of cloves [used for tooth pain] with the imminence of disastef.">4 In the 1970s, the Watchtower, the legal organization of the Jehovah's Witnesses, began predicting that 1 975 would be the year. One family member of a Jehovah's Witness observed her brother and his family giving away their belongings and scaring their young children with instructions on where to hide if they heard screaming. When the Second Coming didn't come, her brother was hospitalized with suicidal depression. » Slide 92: Liberals and Radicals 99 Leon Festinger, with colleagues Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter, developed the concept of "cognitive dissonance" to explain the behavior of people who continue to believe in millenarian sects even after the predicted catastrophe/utopia doesn't come to pass. Their book, When Prophecies Fail, is a psychological examination of the cult that sprang up around Marian Ketch, a woman who claimed to be in communication with aliens. Said aliens predicted a world cataclysm and offered survival in exchange for belief. When the prediction didn't come true, the belie�ers clung more tightly to their belief system, as is common among disappointed believers. Festinger suggested the phrase "cognitive dissonance" to explain this phenomenon. When people try to believe two contradictory things, the resultant discomfort has to be resolved. The more strongly the beliefs are held, the more imperative the resolution becomes. That resolution often comes by actively proselytizing. Explains Festinger, The dissonance is too important and though they may try to hide it, even from themselves, the believers still know that the prediction was false and all their preparations were in vain. The dissonance cannot be eliminated completely by denying or rationalizing the disconfirmation. But there is a way in which the remaining dissonance can be reduced. If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct. Consider the extreme case: if everyone in the whole world believed something there would be no question at all as to the validity of this belief. It is for this reason that we observe the increase in proselytizing fol lowing disconfirmation. If the proselytizing proves successful, then by gathering more adherents and effectively surrounding himself with supporters, the believer reduces dissonance to the point where he can live with it.56 This is a common psychological process, and one that we would do well to name and intervene against as it starts to take hold in our com munities. When the Black Plague devastated Europe, no one had ever seen a Slide 93: 100 Part I: Resistance microbe. They can be forgiven for believing that Doomsday was at hand. We don't have the same excuse. We know what is causing mass extinctions and catastrophic climate change. Yes , these systems are massive, hegemonic, and well-armed. But unlike Yersinia pestis, they are at least visible to the naked eye. This is probably the reason that the millenarian leanings on the left tend not toward explanation, but resolution. We will be saved, though not by the Second Coming. Cosmic forces , often linked to indigenous myths, will appear. The Age of Aquarius faded, to be revived by the Harmonic Convergence in 1987, when eight planets-and all the self-proclaimed druids lined up according with the Mayan calendar, presaging some Vague New World of the usual peace, light, and consciousness . Except nothing happened. Up next were the three syllables that we never have to speak again: Y2K. I had friends who were furious with me for not stockpiling food or water. One woman on the fringes of my social network gave away all her belongings and her cat, so sure was she that her demise drew near. Again, nothing happened. But never fear: the end of the Mayan calendar (once again) in 2012 clearly spells the end of the world. So far, New Age millenarianism hasn't generally resulted in more personal trauma than a pantry full of M REs-military meals, ready to eat. But on a broader scale, the spiritual approach of the alternative cul ture is damaging to our movement. Instead of guiding people to face the hard reality of oppression and environmental destruction, and giving them the emotional and spiritual support to wage a resistance struggle, it offers a range of other-worldly events and characters who deus trans machina?-will save the planet. An example from life. In the middle of a perfectly reasonable dinner conversation about global warming, one of the other guests earnestly tried to reassure us that "the beings [Beings?) from the Akashic Plane would never let that happen." The sudden silence was broken by a man with a long gray beard. " I don't want to save the whales," he said. "That's just karma." Was he missing a segue or some synapses? Never mind a conscience. Another man joined in, in that smooth, soft voice that is supposed to signify spiritual attainment. "We were meant to be the conscious- Slide 94: Liberals and Radicals 101 ness for the earth. This was our childhood stage. If the human race doesn't grow into clear intention, the Holy Ones will step in." The original speaker led the conversation into the inevitable cultural train wreck. "Yes! Haven't you heard the Native American prophecies?" Millenarian beliefs can be a destructive force across communities, and they can also detour vulnerable people into a dead end. Thankfully, very few people have ever heard of Akashic Beings. But what if the dinner party participants provided the only context I knew, the only place to bring my biophilic despair? The stories and myths of a culture provide the matrix for the possible, and only extraordinary individuals are able to break out of their surrounding context. There is a final level of complication. A claim of access to divine guidance is not one that can be proven. Mystical visions are both a com pelling and an individual experience. Both of those characteristics render the realm of the mystic potentially dangerous to the mystic and the people in her community. The compelling, suprareal quality of reli gious visions produces intractable loyalty in the visionary, a loyalty that can lend seductive charisma to anyone. And if the source of the vision is illness rather than a friendly cosmos, the result can be disaster. The individual nature of the visions means that the received guidance can't be verified, only experienced. But more people having the same vision does not actually confirm its veracity: all it confirms is that the human brain is capable of producing ecstatic states. Religious mania is common among schizophrenics, for instance, but mental illness has never yet proved a sound basis for a political strategy. The mystical vision thus contains a contradiction in that people must apply ration ality to an inherently nonrational experience. Three examples from the same movement point to both the promise and pitfalls of mysticism: John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Tubman. Brown was the leader of the Harpers Ferry Raid. He and his f ollowers attacked the US arsenal at Harpers Ferry in an attempt to arm enslaved people and inspire an uprising. Brown believed that God told him to undertake the raid and that he would be given divine protection. But if God promised him protection, God lied, as the raid ended in dis aster. Likewise Nat Turner, the enslaved man who inspired Turner's Rebellion, was a fiery preacher nicknamed "The Prophet" by his fol- Slide 95: 102 Part I: Resistance lowers. He heard voices, had visions, and claimed to be the second coming of Jesus sent to end slavery. Some historians think he was in fact schizophrenic. Believing that an eclipse of the sun was a sign from God, he led seventy-five others in an insurrection that, like the Harpers Ferry Raid, ended in disaster. Turner was caught and hanged, and 200 other blacks were beaten, tortured, and murdered by white mobs. Laws were passed across the South prohibiting the education of both enslaved and free blacks and instituting other reductions of civil rights. In counterpoint is the example of Harriet Tubman. Tubman received a severe head injury as a teenager when she tried to protect an escaping enslaved man. The injury gave her lifelong visions, seizures, and hyper somnia. She claimed the dreams and visions were from God. Some historians suggest she had temporal lobe epilepsy. No one can argue with her incredible success. She spent eleven years as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, guiding over 300 people to freedom, including her disabled father whom she hauled through the swamps on a jerry-rigged, hand-built cart. She was never caught and she never lost a single passenger. She also served as a scout and a spy in the Civil War, leading the spectacular Combahee River Raid, which liberated 700 enslaved people. When in need of guidance, she would lie down and fall unconscious for ten minutes, which she called "consulting with God." Her visions, even when counterintuitive, never led her astray. There is a role for our spiritual longings and for the strength that a true spiritual practice can bring to social movements. There may even be guidance from other realms, but tread carefully: no one has yet developed a simple checklist to distinguish mysticism, desperation, and mental illness. And we need to learn from history. Despite all the suf fering of genocide and depression over centuries, no spirit warriors have ever appeared to save the day. That's N-E-V- E-K. No special gar ments have stopped bullets except Kevlar, a gift from the Pentagon. I think we can all agree that they're not the Holy Ones. No amount of prayer can stop the harrow of oppression, and no special diet can pro duce special powers. The only miracle we're going to get is us. Slide 96: Liberals and Radicals 103 The four main categories of action discussed here-legal remedies, direct action, withdrawal, and spirituality-can be taken up by either liberals or radicals. What defines all four of these categories as liberal or radical is how they are used. It's the ultimate goal that will dictate their strategic use, and it's the goal that's either liberal or radical. The main point of this chapter is that because of the historic domi nance of liberalism, we've been handed a framework that truncates actions that could otherwise be effective. All four of these categories of action could play a role in dismantling civilization and creating a just and sustainable culture, but only if their strengths and liabilities are we accept the insights of radicalism. Remember that liberalism is a combination of idealism with indi vidualism. For liberals, social reality is comprised of individuals, and it's essentially an intellectual event. Oppression is not about concrete systems of power to liberals, but about ideas and attitudes. Hence, edu cation and moral suasion are the order of the day. This has stranded the left with tactics that range from ineffectual to asking nicely will not help. This kind of pleading also keeps us forever trapped in a posture of dependent children. If we're good-compliant, quiet, well-behaved-if we follow the rules-someone in authority will listen and care. Meanwhile, power couldn't care less. Power will only care when it is threatened. And none of the strategies currently accept able on the left contain any threat, precisely because liberalism deeply misunderstands the nature of power. Consider the array of "political actions" we are offered. First we have the legal strategies, the usual petitions, demonstrations, and lawsuits aimed at protecting what shreds of the world the system will allow. People have dedicated their lives to saving a species, a river, a place, someone or something that they are brave enough to love and that they love enough to protect. I am in no way insulting their commitment or sneering at their passion. But it isn't working. The planet is dying. We but what else can we do? The avenues open to us, the petitions, the law do what we can; the planet keeps dying. We know the planet is dying suits, don't challenge the basic processes of civilization, the destructive ridiculous. Nobody cares if we light candles to stop global warming; understood and acknowledged. That understanding will only come if Slide 97: 104 Part I: Resistance and extractive activities on which this way of life depends. That is the insight from which activists are kept, not just by power and its endless propaganda, but also by the subculture of the left. Direct action, even nonviolent direct action, has also been derailed by liberalism. I was born the same year as the Civil Rights Act of 1 9 64. Twenty-five years later, I watched on TV as the people of Berlin pulled down that wall. Nonviolence is a form of resistance that works but it needs to be understood if it's to be used effectively. Gene Sharp is the foremost scholar on nonviolent action. His three volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action should be required reading for all activists as a basic primer on the nature of political struggle. He starts with the insight that It is widely assumed that all social and political behavior must be clearly either violent or nonviolent. This simple dualism leads only to serious distortions of reality, however, one of the main ones being that some people call "nonviolent" anything they regard as good, and "violent" anything they dislike. A second gross distortion occurs when people totally erroneously equate cringing passivity with nonviolent action because in nei ther case is there the use of physical violence. Careful consideration of actual responses to social and political con flict requires that all responses to conflict situations be initially divided into those of action and those of inaction, and not divided according to their violence or lack of violence. In such a division nonviolent action assumes its correct place as one type of active response.57 Nonviolent direct action is a form of struggle which vses political, eco nomic, or social leverage in an attempt to coerce the structures of power to change, up to and including complete abdication. Sharp continues, Several writers have pointed to the general similarities of non violent action to military war. Nonviolent action is a means of combat, as is war. It involves the matching of forces and the waging of "battles ," requires wise strategy and tactics, and Slide 98: Liberals and Radicals 105 demands of its "soldiers" courage, discipline, and sacrifice. This view of nonviolent action as a technique of active combat is diametrically opposed to the popular assumption that, at its strongest, nonviolent action relies on rational persuasion of the opponent, and that more commonly it consists simply of passive submission.58 If you are someone who embraces a nonviolent ethic, then you need to understand how the technique of nonviolent direct action works if you are going to employ it successfully. A radical analysis will lead you to the conclusion that justice will only be won by a struggle; oppres sion is not a mistake; and nice, reasoned requests will not make it stop. In the words of Frederick Douglass, who well knew, " Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and never will." Once we understand that, the activist's task becomes one of simple strategy: power must be forced, so how best to apply that force? The left has often operated on the smug or sentimental belief that nonviolence works only by personal, moral example. It doesn't. Having said that, there is a moral high ground that has historically been useful for nonviolent struggles. When actionists stick to nonviolence while being attacked by the police or military, there is often an upswell of sympathy amongst the general public. Sharp calls this phenomenon a f orm of "political jujitsu." If you are building a mass movement, then nonviolent discipline is a good technique to employ for this reason alone. But we cannot lose sight of the nature of power and the nature of the struggle that is required to change it. Against power, only force will work. Progressives have repeatedly refused to understand that, from the abolitionists who thought that a pending spiritual transfor mation would end slavery, to Gandhi writing a letter to Hitler asking him to stop (and then being shocked when it didn't work) , to both whites and blacks in the civil rights movement who thought lunch counter sit-ins were too confrontational. Right now, the culture of most of the left has declared any action but "nonviolence" off-limits for discussion. I put nonviolence in quotes because by and large the people who have embraced such nonviolence don't actually understand the technique of nonviolent direct action. The Slide 99: 106 Part I: Resistance correct name for them is pacifists, people who for moral or spiritual reasons have an "opposition to war or violence as a means of resolving disputes." Of course, by that definition I 'm a pacifist, as I 'm against war and I also think violence is a bad way to settle disputes. But it isn't disputes I 'm concerned with here; it's global systems of oppression, especially the arrangement called civilization , which is right now devouring the world. Meanwhile, I 've heard the proponents of so-called nonviolence declare that speaking in anything besides " I-statements" is violent. Fine; I feel that that is ridiculous. A personal commitment to the rejection of violence can be an hon orable and thoughtful act. But if this commitment leads to an inability to face the realities of systems of power-their inherent violence, their intransigence, their sociopathic destruction of anyone and anything in their way-and what is involved in changing those systems, then the wholesale embrace of such pacifism will only impede our ability to win justice and save what's left of our planet. Systems of power are not swayed by moral exhortation. They don't care how well-behaved you are, how much you believe in the power of healing, or how much you want the inner child of perpetrators and CEOs to feel the love they supposedly never got. Their inner children are sociopathic. And out in the real world, they will tum fire hoses and German shepherds on your actual children. Nonviolent actionists have been gunned down in cold blood, tortured, thrown in jail to rot. Any quick perusal of the history of political struggle will yield the harsh truth, the lesson learned from Bloody Sunday to Tiananmen Square: nonviolence does not work by persuasion, nor does it offer protection, and the left needs to give up its maudlin belief in both. Those are not the reasons to employ it. Nonviolence works by facing the ruthless reality ot oppression, iden tifying its linchpins, and using direct action to interrupt the flow of power and hopefully dislodge some portion of its foundation. Instead of weapons, the technique uses people, usually large numbers of people willing to have direct confrontations with power, which means they risk better prepared we will be to make strategic and tactical decisions, indi vidually and collectively. getting killed. The sooner the left faces the reality of that danger, the Slide 100: Liberals and Radicals 107 Forms of withdrawalism are another popular offer from the left. This especially includes individual, personal "growth." One American Bud dhist writes, "What I do for peace and justice is split wood."59 To declare this political action is a level of narcissism that is insane. You are not the world. And guess what? How you feel will not change the world, no matter how much wood you chop and how peaceful you feel while chopping it. Hyperindividualism renders this method useless. Withdrawal has to happen on a much larger scale to be effective: we need to think insti tutionally, not personally, which is the exact point of divergence between liberals and radicals. Alternative institutions like local food networks, communal child care, nonindustrial schooling, direct democ racy, and community-based policing and justice are essential to both a culture of resistance and to postcarbon survival. Replacing one con sumer choice with another is an act with almost no impact. Indeed, the choices themselves are often useless: ethanol has a net energy loss, and a solar panel may use more energy in its production than it will save in its use. But again, the individualism of liberalism obstructs our ability to use withdrawal as a serious political strategy. We are encouraged to make lifestyle choices ranging from diet to "green weddings" to suburban sprawl ecovillages that use up slightly fewer resources while still using up plenty. Go Again, these are essen tially a withdrawalist approach. None of these challenge the systems of power that are actively dismembering our planet. Remember, there are no individual solutions to political problems, not ever. At best, these attempts are well-meaning, if misguided. At worst, they hijack the very real concern and despair of anyone who's even half awake, offering a deeply delusional sense of hope. Spirituality, the last category of action we discussed, has played a strong role in many social change movements: the black churches have been called the cradle of the civil rights movement; Liberation Theology has been central to prodemocracy struggles in Latin America; and Christian missionaries helped end slavery and the caste system in Kerala, India, leaving a human rights legacy that still holds today. But spirituality plays a role in resistance by offering the exact opposite of the American Buddhist quoted above. First, it lends a moral-mythic Slide 101: 108 Part I: Resistance framework for facing down power as in the Jews' flight from enslave ment in Egypt or Jesus's throwing the moneylenders from the Temple. In contrast, the hyperindividualism of "inner peace" as a final goal offers nothing but moral and political disengagement. Second, a spir ituality of resistance provides a connection to something way bigger than ourselves. Whatever you want to call it-the Great Mystery, the Goddess, a Higher Power-that source can lead us out of our personal pain, loss, and exhaustion, and lend us the courage and strength to fight for justice. The key words here are "way bigger than ourselves." This is not to say that our personal suffering should not be addressed indeed, conditions like depression, addiction, and PTS D can be life-threatening and people in our communities that are afflicted need our compassion and help. But a spiritual system worth the name must ultimately lead us out, not in, both because it offers an experience of love or grace beyond our personal pain and because it connects us to the wider world-human, planetary, and cosmic-that must call us to action. A serious strategy to save this planet has to consider every possible course of action. To state it clearly once more: our planet is dying. There could not be a greater call to responsibility than stopping the destruc tion of all life. A heartfelt belief in human goodness is not a political strategy. Neither is our spiritual growth or our moral purity. We all need to decide for ourselves what actions we can and cannot take, and as in all things that matter, " No" is absolute. That should be a given. There is room-indeed there is a necessity-for every level of engage ment in this project. But it is long past time to stop playing make believe about the threats to our planet, solutions to those threats , and about the courage and sacrifice that will be required to bring the system down. So can it be done? Can industrial civilization be stopped? Theoretically, it's not that difficult. Industrialization is dependent on very fragile infrastructure. It requires vast quantities of fossil fuels, which come from relatively few places, enter through a small number of centralized Slide 102: Liberals and Radicals 109 ports and processing facilities, and then have to be transported out along vulnerable supply lines, including the highway system. I ndus trial civilization is utterly dependent on electricity, and the electric grid is a million fragile miles long. The system is also dependent on the Internet; globalization would not be possible without it to organize and transfer both information and capital. And finally there is capital itself, which flows every day through twenty major stock markets-a finite number indeed. Any of the above could be targeted in a multitude of ways. Serious nonviolent actionists could blockade the ports, the processing facilities, the stock exchanges, the main highways outside New York, Wash ington, DC, Chicago. There are only sixteen main bridges into Manhattan. A flow of bodies would be necessary to keep the system at a standstill day after day, bodies provided by people willing to face the consequences. Ask yourself if you have that many people. No? Now ask yourself how long it would take to get that many people, how much political education, how much consciousness-raising against the sweet, numbing dream of conformity and cheap consumer goods? How much can you count on that slow build of courage when the planet is losing species and gaining heat every minute? The human race as a whole could do with an honest assessment of the destruction inherent in civilization and in our resultant swollen numbers. We could make a series of difficult decisions, reorganize our societies economically, politically, spiritually, and sexually, and restore the monocultures of asphalt and agriculture to living, biotic communities inside which our species could take its humble place once more. I nstead, China and India are hurtling into industrializa tio n as fast as the coal can be mined , and the United States' entitlement to 4,000 pounds of steel for every citizen plus the gas to move it continues unabated. We're not on the edge of the "Great Turning," but on the brink of destruction. In a similar vein, industrialization could be brought down by non violent direct action-but will it, when most environmentalists refuse to understand the basic nature of political power and hence the princi ples by which the strategy works ? More importantly, do we have the sheer numbers of people that would be required? And how many Slide 103: 110 Part "" 's;stance species have gone extinct since you opened this book? I need hope to be actual evidence that either the bulk of humanity will willingly give up backed up by more than a fundamentalist insistence on it: I need proof, • . 1 i civilization, right now, or that enough of us are willing to risk our lives ; to bring it down to make nonviolent interventions feasible. Reality tells me diff erently. That means we face a decision, individ ually and as a resistance movement. Because a small number of people could directly target that infrastructure; a few more, willing to persist, could potentially bring it down. S1 lSI lSI � Q: I believe in the hundredth monkey story, in which one monkey learned a new skill, and taught it to another, and another until when a critical mass of monkeys-say, one hundred-had learned this skill, suddenly all the monkeys knew the skill, even on other islands. If enough minds are changed, won't civilization transform itself into something sustainable? Derrick Jensen: First, the hundredth monkey story is not true. It is a story made up by some New Agers. It is stupid to base a strategy for saving the planet on a fictional story. If we're going to base our strategy on the hundredth monkey, why don't we just base it on Santa Claus bringing us a sustainable culture for Christmas? And, no, civilization will not transform itself into .something sus tainable. That's not physically possible. Civilization is functionally unsustainable. And the fact that ideas like the hundredth monkey are spoken of quite often in public discourse lets us know the extreme dis tance that we have to go to make the sort of changes that are necessary. The fact that people are still talking about this level of detachment from physical reality is evidence itself that there will not be a voluntary trans formation. No, the momentum is too fierce. What we need to do is stop this cul ture before it kills the planet. And I can't speak for you, but I'm not # Slide 104: Liberals and Radicals 111 going to rely on a fictional hundredth monkey to do the work for me when I can do the work myself. Slide 105: (}japter 4 Culture of Resistance by Lierre Keith Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver, poet The culture of the left needs a serious overhaul. At our best and bravest moments, we are the people who believe in a just world; who fight the power with all the courage and commitment that women and men can pos sess; who refuse to be bought or beaten into submission, and refuse equally to sell each other out. The history of struggles for justice is inspiring, ennobling even, and it should encourage us to redouble our efforts now when the entire world is at stake. Instead, our leadership is leading us astray. There are historic reasons for the misdirection of many of our movements, and we would do well to understand those reasons before it's too late.' The history of misdirection starts in the Middle Ages when various alternative sects arose across Europe, some more strictly religious, some more politically utopian. The Adamites, for instance, originated in North Africa in the second century, and the last of the Neo-Adamites were forcibly suppressed in Bohemia in 1849! They wanted to achieve a state of primeval innocence from sin. They practiced nudism and ecstatic rituals of rebirth in caves, rejected marriage, and held property communally. Groups such as the Diggers (True Levelers) were more political. They argued for an egalitarian social structure based on small agrarian communities that embraced ecological principles. Writes one historian, "They contended that if only the common people of England would form themselves into self-supporting communes, there would be no place in such a society for the ruling classes."l Not all dissenting groups had a political agenda. Many alternative sects rejected material accumulation and social status but lacked any clear political analysis or egalitarian program. Such subcultures have repeatedly arisen across Europe, coalescing around a common con stellation of themes: 113 Slide 106: 114 Part I: Resistance • A critique of the dogma, hierarchy, and corruption of organ ized religion; A rejection of the moral decay of urban life and a belief in the superiority of rural life; A romantic or even sentimental appeal to the past: Eden, the Golden Age, pre-Norman England; A millenialist bent; A spiritual practice based on mysticism; a direct rather than mediated experience of the sacred. Sometimes this is inside a Christian framework; other examples involve rejection of Christianity. Often the spiritual practices include ecstatic and altered states; Pantheism and nature worship, often concurrent with eco logical principles, and leading to the formation of agrarian communities; Rejection of marriage. Sometimes sects practice celibacy; others embrace polygamy, free love, or group marriage. • • • • • • Within these dissenting groups, there has long been a tension between identifying the larger society as corrupt and naming it unjust. This tension has been present for over 1 ,000 years. Groups that cri tique society as degenerate or immoral have mainly responded by withdrawing from society. They want to make heaven on Earth in the here and now, abandoning the outside world. " In the world but not of it," the Shakers said. Many of these groups were and are deeply paci fistic, in part because the outside world and all things political are seen as corrupting, and in part for strongly held moral reasons. "Corruption groups" are not always leftist or progressive. Indeed, Tany right-wing and reactionary elements have formed sects and founded communi ties. In these groups, the sin in urban or modem life is hedonism, not hierarchy. In fact, these groups tend to enforce strict hierarchy: older men over younger men, men over women. Often they have a charis matic leader and the millenialist bent is quite marked. "Justice groups," on the other hand, name society as inequitable rather than corrupt, and usually see organized religion as one more hierarchy that needs to be dismantled. They express broad political Slide 107: Culture of Resistance 115 goals such as land reform, pluralistic democracy, and equality between the sexes. These more politically oriented spiritual groups walk the ten sion between withdrawal and engagement. They attempt to create communities that support a daily spiritual practice, allow for the with drawal of material participation in unjust systems of power, and encourage political activism to bring their New Jerusalem into being. Contemporary groups like the Catholic Workers are attempts at such a project. This perennial trend of critique and utopian vision was bolstered by Romanticism, a cultural and artistic movement that began in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe. It was at least partly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, which valued rationality and science. The image of the Enlightenment was the machine, with the living cosmos reduced to clockwork. As the industrial revolution gained strength, rural lifeways were destroyed while urban areas swelled with suffering and squalor. Blake's dark, Satanic mills destroyed rivers, the commons of wetlands and forests fell to the highest bidder, and coal dust was so thick in London that the era could easily be deemed the Age of Tuberculosis. In Germany, the Rhine and the Elbe were killed by dye works and other industrial processes. And along with natural communities, human communities were devastated as well. Romanticism revolved around three main themes: longing for the past, upholding nature as pure and authentic, and idealizing the heroic and alienated individual. Germany, where elements of an older pagan folk culture still carried on, was in many ways the center of the Romantic movement. How much of this Teutonic nature worship was really drawn from surviving pre-Christian elements, and how much was simply a Romantic recreation-the Renaissance Faire of the nineteenth cen tury-is beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say, there were enough cultural elements for the Romantics to build on. In 1774, German writer Goethe penned the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a young man who visits an enchanting peasant village, falls in love with an unattainable young woman, and suffers to the point of committing suicide. The book struck an over- Slide 108: 116 Part I: Resistance sensitive nerve, and, overnight, young men across Europe began mod eling themselves on the protagonist, a depressive and passionate artist. Add to this the supernatural and occult elements of Edgar Allan Poe's work, and, by the nineteenth century, the Romantics of that day resem bled modern Goths. A friend of mine likes to say that history is same characters, different costumes-and in this case the costumes haven't even changed much.4 Another current of Romanticism that eventually influenced our cur rent situation was bolstered by philosopher Jean Jacques Rosseau,5 who described a " state of nature" in which humans lived before society developed. He was not the creator of the image of the noble savage that dubious honor falls to John Dryden, in his r672 play The Conquest of Granada. Rousseau did, however, popularize one of the core compo nents that would coalesce into the cliche, arguing that there was a fundamental rupture between human nature and human society. The concept of such a divide is deeply problematical, as by definition it leaves cultures that aren't civilizations out of the circle of human society. Whether the argument is for the bloodthirsty savage or the noble savage, the underlying concept of a "state of nature" places hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, nomadic pastoralists, and even some agriculturalists outside the most basic human activity of creating culture. All culture is a human undertaking: there are no humans living in a "state of nature."6 With the idea of a state of nature, vastly different societies are collapsed into an image of the "primitive," which exists unchanging outside of history and human endeavor. Indeed, one offshoot of Romanticism was an artistic movement called Primitivism that inspired its own music, literature, and art. Romanti cism in general and Primitivism in particular saw EU1;,opean culture as overly rational and repressive of natural impulses. So-called primitive cultures, in contrast, were cast as emotional, innocent and childlike, sex ually uninhibited, and at one with the natural world. The Romantics embraced the beliefthat "primitives" were naturally peaceful; the Prim itivists tended to believe in their proclivity to violence. Either cliche could be made to work because the entire image is a construct bearing no rela tion to the vast variety of forms that indigenous human cultures have taken. Culture is a series of choices-political choices made by a social Slide 109: Culture of Resistance 117 animal with moral agency. Both the noble savage and the bloodthirsty savage are objectifying, condescending, and racist constructs. Romanticism tapped into some very legitimate grievances. Urbanism is alienating and isolating. Industrialization destroys communities, both human and biotic. The conformist demands of hierarchical societies leave our emotional lives inauthentic and numb, and a culture that hates the animality of our bodies drives us into exile from our only homes. The realization that none of these conditions are inherent to human existence or to human society can be a profound relief. Further, the exis tence of cultures that respect the earth, that give children kindness instead of public school, that share food and joy in equal measure, that might even have mystical technologies of ecstasy, can serve as both an inspiration and as evidence of the crimes committed against our hearts, our culture, and our planet. But the places where Romanticism failed still haunt the culture of the left today and must serve as a warning if we are to build a culture of resistance that can support a true resistance movement. In Germany, the combination of Romanticism and nationalism cre ated an upswell of interest in myths. They spurred a widespread longing f an ancient or even primordial connection with the German land or scape. Youth are the perennially disaffected and rebellious, and German youth in the late nineteenth century coalesced into their own counter culture. They were called Wandervogel or wandering spirits. They rejected the rigid moral code and work ethic of their bourgeois parents, romanticized the image of the peasant, and wandered the countryside with guitars and rough-spun tunics. The Wandervogel started with urban teachers taking their students for hikes in the country as part of the Lebensre orm (life reform) movement. This social movement emphasized f physical fitness and natural health, experimenting with a range of alter native modalities like homeopathy, natural food, herbalism, and meditation. The Lebensre orm created its own clinics, schools, and inten f tional communities, all variations on a theme of reestablishing a connection with nature. The short hikes became weekends; the week ends became a lifestyle. The Wandervogel embraced the natural in opposition to the artificial: rural over urban, emotion over rationality, sunshine and diet over medicine, spontaneity over control. The youth Slide 110: 118 Part I: Resistance set up "nests" and "antihomes" in their towns and occupied abandoned castles in the forests. The Wandervogel was the origin of the youth hostel movement. They sang folk songs; experimented with fasting, raw foods, and vegetarianism; and embraced ecological ideas-all before the year 1900. They were the anarchist vegan squatters of the age. Environmental ideas were a fundamental part of these movements. Nature as a spiritual source was fundamental to the Romantics and a guiding principle of Lebensre form. Adolph Just and Benedict Lust were a pair of doctors who wrote a foundational Lebensre orm text, Return f Nature, in 1896. In it, they decried, Man in his misguidance has powerfully interfered with nature. He has devastated the forests, and thereby even changed the atmospheric conditions and the climate. Some species of plants and animals have become entirely extinct through man, although they were essential in the economy of Nature. Every where the purity of the air is affected by smoke and the like, and the rivers are defiled. These and other things are serious encroachments upon Nature, which men nowadays entirely overlook but which are of the greatest importance, and at once show their evil effect not only upon plants but upon animals as well, the latter not having the endurance and power of resist ance of man.? Alternative communities soon sprang up all over Europe. The small village of Ascona, Switzerland, became a counter cultural center between 1900 and 1920. Experiments involved "surrealism, modem dance, dada, Paganism, feminism, pacifism, psychoanjIysis and nature cure. "8 Some of the figures who passed through Ascona included Carl Jung, I sadora Duncan, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and an alcoholic Herman Hesse seeking a cure. Clearly, social change-indeed, revolution-was one of the ideas on the table at Ascona. This chaos of alternative spiritual, cultural, and political trends began to make its way to the U S . On August 20, 1903, for instance, an anarchist newspaper in San Francisco published a long article describing the experiments underway at Ascona. to Slide 111: Culture of Resistance 119 As we will see, the connections between the Lebensref orm, Wander vogel youth, and the 1960s counterculture in the U S are startlingly direct. German Eduard Baltzer wrote a lengthy explication of naturliche lebensweise (natural lifestyle) and founded a vegetarian community. Baltzer-inspired painter Karl Wihelm Diefenbach, who also started a number of alternative communities and workshops dedicated to reli gion, art, and science, all based on Lebensref orm ideas. Artists Gusto Graser and Fidus pretty well created the artistic style of the German counterculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Viewers of their work would be forgiven for thinking that their paint ings of psychedelic colors, swirling floraforms, and naked bodies embracing were album covers circa 1968. Fidus even used the iconic peace sign in his art. Graser was a teacher and mentor to Herman Hesse, who was taken up by the Beatniks. Siddhartha and Steppenwolfwere written in the 1920S but sold by the millions in the U S in the 1960s. Declares one historian, " Legitimate history will always recount Hesse as the most important link between the European counter-culture of his [Hesse's] youth and their latter-day descendants in America."9 Along with a few million other Europeans, some of the proponents of the Wandervogel and Lebensreform movements immigrated to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most famous of these Lebensreform immigrants was Dr. Benjamin Lust, deemed the Father of Naturopathy, quoted previously. Write Gordon Kennedy and Kody Ryan, " Everything from massage, herbology, raw foods, anti-vivisection and hydro-therapy to Eastern influences like Ayurveda and Yoga found their way to an American audience through Lust. "lo In Return To Nature, he railed against water and air pollution, vivisection, vaccination, meat, smoking, alcohol, coffee, and public schooling. Any of this sound a wee bit familiar? Gandhi, a fan, was inspired by Lust's principles to open a Nature Cure clinic in India. The emphasis on sunshine and naturism led many of these Leben sref orm immigrants to move to warm, sunny California and Florida. Sun worship was embraced as equal parts ancient Teutonic religion, health-restoring palliative, and body acceptance. It was much easier to live outdoors and scrounge for food where the weather never dropped Slide 112: 120 Part I: Resistance below freezing. Called Nature Boys, naturemensch, and modem primi tives, they set up camp and began attracting followers and disciples. German immigrant Arnold Ehret, for instance, wrote a number of books on fasting, raw foods , and the health benefits of nude sun bathing, books that would become standard texts for the San Francisco hippies. Gypsy Boots was another direct link from the Lebensre form to the hippies. Born in San Francisco, he was a follower of German immi grant Maximillian Sikinger. After the usual fasting, hiking, yoga, and sleeping in caves, he opened his " Health Hut" in Los Angeles, which was surprisingly successful. He was also a paid performer at music fes tivals like Monterey and Newport in 1967 and 1968, appearing beside Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. Carolyn Garcia, Jerry's wife, was apparently a big admirer. Boots was also in the cult film Mondo Hollywood with Frank Zappa. The list of personal connections between the Wandervogel Nature Boys and the hippies is substantial, and makes for an unbroken line of cultural continuity. But before we turn to the 1960s, it's important to examine what happened to the Lebensre orm and Wandervogel in Ger f many with the rise of Nazism. This is not easy to do. Fin de siecle Germany was a tumult of change and ideas, pulling in all directions. There was a huge and polit ically powerful socialist party, the Sozialdemokratische Partei . Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany), or S P D , which one historian called "the pride of the Second International. " I I In 1880, it garnered more votes than any other party in Germany, and, in 19 12, it had more seats in Parliament than any other party. It helped usher in the first parliamentary democracy, including universal suffrage, and brought a shorter workday, legal workers' councils in industry, and a rvogel and Leben social safety net. To these serious activists, the Wandt sref orm, especially "the more manifestly idiotic of these cults ,"" were fringe movements. To state the obvious, the constituents of S P D were working-class and poor people concerned with survival and justice, form, with their yoga, spiritualism, and dietary silli while the Lebensre ness, were almost entirely middle class. Here we begin to see these utopian ideas take a sinister tum. The seeds of contradiction are easy to spot in the volkisch movement entry Slide 113: Culture of Resistance 121 on Wikipedia, which states, "The volkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folk lore and the 'organic. " . . . In a narrow definition it can be used to designate only groups that consider human beings essentially pre formed by blood, i.e. inherited character." Immediately, there are problems. The volkisch is marked with a Nazi tag. One Wikipedian writes, " Personally I consider it offensive to claim that an ethnic definition of ' Folk' equals Nationalism and/or Racism." Another Wikipedian points out that the founders of the volkisch con cept were leftist thinkers. Another argues, "With regard to its origins . . . the volkisch idea is wholeheartedly non-racist, and people like Landauer and Mtihsam (the leading German anarchists of their time) represented a continuing current of volkisch anti-racism. It's understandable if the German page focuses on the racist version-a culture of guilt towards Romanticism seems to be one of Hitler's lega cies-but these other aspects need to be looked at toO."13 Who is correct? Culture, ethnicity, folklore, and nationalism are all strands that history has woven into the word. But volk does have a first philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder, who founded the whole idea of f olklore, of a culture of the common people that should be valued, not despised. He urged Germans to take pride in their language, stories, art, and history. The populist appeal in his ideas-indeed, their necessity to any popular movement-may seem obvious to us 200 years later, but at the time this valuing of a people's culture was new and radical. His personal collection of folk poetry inspired a national hunger for folklore; the brothers Grimm were one direct result of Herder's work. He also argued that everyone from the king to the peasants belonged to the volk, a serious break with the ruling notion that only the nobility were the inheritors of culture and that that culture should emulate classical Greece. He believed that his conception of the volk would lead to democ racy and was a supporter of the French Revolution. Herder was very aware of where the extremes of nationalism could lead and argued for the full rights of Jews in Germany. He rejected racial concepts, saying that language and culture were the distinctions that mattered, not race, and asserted that humans were all one species. He wrote, "No nationality has been solely designated by God as the Slide 114: 122 Part I: Resistance chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and culti vate the garden of the common good."'4 Another major proponent of leftist communitarianism was Gustav Landauer, a Jewish German. He was one of the leading anarchists through the Wilhelmine era until his death in 1 9 1 9 when he was arrested by the Freikorps and stoned to death. He was a mystic as well as being a political writer and activist. His biographer, Eugene Lunn, describes Landauer's ideas as a "synthesis of volkisch romanticism and libertarian socialism," hence, "romantic socialism."'5 He was also a pacifist, rejecting violence as a means to revolution both individually and collectively. His belief was that the creation of libertarian commu nities would "gradually release men and women from their childlike dependence upon authority, " the state, organized religion, and other forms of hierarchy.'6 His goal was to build "radically democratic, par ticipatory communities. "'7 Landauer spoke to the leftist writers, artists, intellectuals, and youths who felt alienated by modernity and urbanism and expressed a very real need--emotional, political, and spiritual-for community renewal. He had a full program for the revolutionary transformation of society. Rural communes were the first practical step toward the end of capi talism and exploitation. These communities would form federations and work together to create the infrastructure of a new society based on egalitarian principles. It was an A to B plan that never lost sight of the real conditions of oppression under which people were living. After World War I , roughly one hundred communes were formed in Ger many, and, of those, thirty were politically leftist, formed by anarchists or communists. There was also a fledgling women's commune move ment whose goal was an autonomous feminist culture, similar to the ' contemporary lesbian land movement in the U S . Where did this utopian resistance movement go wrong? The problem was that it was, as historian Peter Weindling puts it, "politi cally ambivalent. ",8 Writes Weindling, "The outburst of utopian social protest took contradictory artistic, Germanic volkish, or technocratic directions." '9 Some of these directions, unhitched from a framework of social justice, were harnessed by the right, and ultimately incorpo rated into Nazi ideology. Lebensre form activities like hiking and eating Slide 115: Culture of Resistance 123 whole-grain bread were seen as strengthening the political body and were promoted by the Nazis. "A racial concept of health was central to National Socialism," writes Weindling. Meanwhile, Jews, gays and les bians, the mentally ill, and anarchists were seen as "diseases" that weakened the Germanic race as a whole. and fitness of the German people-a primary fixation of Nazi culture depended on their connection to the health of the land, a connection that was both physical and spiritual. The Nazis were a peculiar combi nation of the Romantic and the Modern, and the backward-looking traditionalist and the futuristic technotopians were both attracted to their ideology. The Nazi program was as much science as it was emo tionality. Writes historian David Blackborn, National socialism managed to reconcile, at least theoretically, two powerful and conflicting impulses of the later nineteenth century, and to benefit from each. One was the infatuation with the modern and the technocratic, where there is evident con tinuity from Wilhelmine Germany to Nazi eugenicists and Ecological ideas were likewise embraced by the Nazis. The health Autobahn builders; the other was the "cultural revolt" against modernity and machine-civilization, pressed into use by the Nazis as part of their appeal to educated elites and provincial philistines alike.20 Let's look at another activist of the time, one who was political. Erich Miihsam, a German Jewish anarchist, was a writer, poet, dramatist, and cabaret performer. He was a leading radical thinker and agitator during the Weimar Republic, and won international acclaim for his dramatic work satirizing Hitler. He had a keen interest in combining anarchism with theology and communal living, and spent time in the alternative community of Ascona. Along with many leftists, he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps in Sonnenburg, Brandenburg, and finally Oranienburg. Intellectuals around the world protested and demanded Miihsam's release, to no avail. When his wife Zenzl was allowed to visit him, his face was so bruised she didn't recognize him. The guards beat and tortured him for seventeen months. They made Slide 116: 124 Part I: Resistance him dig his own grave. 'Ibey broke his teeth and burned a swastika into his scalp. Yet when they tried to make him sing the Nazi anthem, he would sing the I nternational instead. At his last torture session, they smashed in his skull and then killed him by lethal injection. 'Ibey fin ishedby hanging his body in a latrine. 'Ibe intransigent aimlessness and anemic narcissism of so much of the contemporary counterculture had no place beside the unassailable courage and sheer stamina of this man. Sifting through this material, I will admit to a certain amount of despair: between the feckless and the fascist, will there ever be any hope for this movement? 'Ibe existence of Erich Miihsam is an answer to embrace. Likewise, reading history back wards, so that Nazis are preordained in the volkish idea, is insulting to the inheritors of this idea who resisted Fascism with M iihsam's forti tude. 'Ibere were German leftists who fought for radical democracy and j ustice, not despite their communitarianism, but with it. Our contemporary environmental movement has much to learn from this history. Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, in their book Ecof ascism: Lessons from the German Experience,21 explore the idea that fascism or other reactionary politics are "perhaps the unavoidable tra jectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them. E schewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield bar baric results."22 'Ibe contemporary alterna-culture won't result in anything more sin ister than silliness; fascism in the US is most likely to come from actual right-wing ideologues mobilizing the resentments of the disaffected and economically stretched mainstream, not from Ntw Age workshop hoppers. And friends of Mary Jane aren't known for their virulence against anything besides regular bathing. German immigrants brought the Lebensre orm and Wandervogel to the U S , and it didn't seed a fascist f movement here. None of this leads inexorably to fascism. But we need to take seriously the history of how ideas which we think of as innately progressive, like ecology and animal rights, became intertwined with a fascist movement. Slide 117: Culture of Resistance 125 An alternative culture built around the project of an individualistic and interior experience, whether spiritual or psychological, cannot create a resistance movement, no matter how many societal conventions it tres passes. I ndeed, the Wandervogel manifesto stated, "We regard with contempt all who call us political,"23 and their most repeated motto was "Our lack of purpose is our strength." But as Laqueur points out, Lack of interest in public affairs is not civic virtue, and . . . an inability to think in political categories does not prevent people from getting involved in political disaster . . . The Wander vogel . . . completely failed. They did not prepare their members for active citizenship . . . . Both the socialist youth and the Catholics had firmer ground under their feet; each had a set of values to which they adhered. But in the education of the free youth movement there was a dangerous vacuum all too ready to be filled by moral relativisim and nihilism.24 We are facing another disaster, and if we fail there will be no future to learn from our mistakes. That same "lack ofinterest"-often a stance of smug alienation-is killing our last chance of resistance. We are not preparing a movement for active citizenship and all that implies-the commitment, courage, and sacrifice that real resistance demands. There is no firm moral ground under the feet of those who can only counsel withdrawal and personal comfort in the face of atrocity. And the current Wandervogel end in nihilism as well, repeating that it's over, we can do nothing, the human race has run its course and the bacteria will inherit the earth. The parallels are exact. And the outcome? The Wandervogel marched off to World War I, where they "perished in Flanders and Verdun. "25 Of those who returned from the war, a small, vocal minority became communists. A larger group embraced right-wing protofascist groups. But the largest segment was apolitical and apathetic. "This was no accidental development," writes Laqueur!6 The living world is now perishing in its own Flanders and Verdun, a bloody, senseless pile of daily species. Today there are still wood thrushes, small brown angels of the deep woods. Today there are northern leopard frogs, but only barely. There may not be Burmese star Slide 118: 126 Part I: Resistance tortoises, with their shells like golden poinsettias; the last time anyone looked-for 400 hours with trained dogs-they only found five. If the largest segment of us remains apolitical and apathetic, they will all surely die. This is the history woven through the contemporary alternative culture. It takes strands of the Romantics, the Wandervogel, and the Lebensre f orm, winds through the Beatniks and the hippies, and splits into a series of subcultures with different emphases, from self-help and twelve-step believers to New Age spiritual shoppers. There is a set of accumulated ideas and behavioral norms that are barely articulated and yet hold sway across the left. It is my goal here to fully examine these currents so we may collectively decide which are useful and which are detrimental to the culture of resistance. against "oppositional culture," knowing full well that real life is rarely lived in such stark terms. Many of these norms and behaviors form a continuum along which participants move with relative ease. In my own experience, these conflicting currents have at times merged into a train wreck of the absurd and the brave, often in the same evening. The righteous vegan dinner of even more righteously shoplifted ingre dients, followed by a daring attack on the fence at the military base, which included both spray painting and fervent Wicca-esque chanting-in case our energy really For the purposes of this discussion, I 've set "alternative culture" could bring it down-rounded out with a debrief by Talking Stick which became a f oray into that happy land where polyamory a group meltdown of such operatic proportions that � neighbors called the police. Ah, youth. I was socialized into some of these cultural concepts and practices as a teenager. I know my way around a mosh pit, a womyn's circle, and a chakra cleansing. I embraced much of the alternative culture for rea sons that are understandable. At sixteen, fighting authority felt like life and death survival, and all hierarchy was self-evidently domination. meets untreated bipolar disorder (medication being a tool of The Man), Slide 119: Alternative vs. Oppositional Culture AL TERNATIVE C U L TURE Apathetic-to-hostile to concept of political engagement Change seen in psychological and cultural terms Individual consciousness is the target Adolescent values of youth movement O P PO S ITIONAL C U L TURE Consciously embraces resistance Change seen in economic and political terms Concrete institutions are targeted Adult values of discernment, responsibility Legitimate authority is accepted and cul tivated Strong moral code based on universal human rights Attacks on power structures All authority is rejected out of hand Rejection of moral judgment Attacks on conventions • • all boundaries f air game shock value Loyalty and solidarity valued Goals are adult concerns: guide the com munity, socialize the young, enforce norms, participate in larger project of righting the world A politics of community that values responsibility, mutual aid, work ethic-dependent on self -regulation of mature adults Politics is Alienated individual valorized Goal is to feel intense, "authentic," unmediated emotions A politics of emotion in which f eeling states outweigh effective strategy or tactics Politics is who you are what you do Human relations are corrupted in the act of political resistance; only right con sciousness can prevail Human relations are corrupted by sys tems of power and oppression; justice must prevail even if it takes generations Withdraw loyalty from systems of oppression and the oppressors but active engagement to stop injustice Idealism tempered by experience Generalized withdrawal as strategy Moral vigor of youth cut off from action • horizontal hostility • questions of in-group/out group Cultural appropriation • Cultural reclamation and protection (oppressed group) • Cultural respect, political solidarity (allies) Slide 120: 128 Part I: Resistance 1 i sphere where change was possible. I knew there was something wrong '1 with that, but arguing with the New Age branch led to defeat by spiri- I Meanwhile, all around me, in quite varied venues, people said that personal change was political change-or even insisted that it was the only tual smugness and Gandhian cliches. The fact that I have a degenerative disease was always used as evidence against me by these people. Arguing with the militant, political branch ( Did it really matter if someone ate her pizza with "liquid meat," aka cheese? Was I really a sell-out if I saw my family on Christmas?) led to accusations of a lack of true commitment. With very little cross generational guidance and the absence of a real culture of resistance, I was left accepting some of these arguments despite internal misgivings. Way too many potential activists, lacking neither courage nor com mitment, are lost in the same confusion. It's in the hope that we are collectively capable of something better that I offer these criticisms. This focus on individual change is a hallmark of liberalism. It comes in a few different flavors, different enough that their proponents don't recognize that they are all in the same category. But underneath the surface differences, the commonality of individualism puts all of these subgroups on a continuum. It starts with the virulently anti political dwellers in workshop culture; only individuals (i.e., themselves) are a worthy project and only individuals can change. The continuum moves toward more social consciousness to include people who identify oppression as real but still earnestly believe in liberal solutions, mainly education, psychological change, and "personal example." It ends at the far extreme where personal lifestyle becomes personal purity and identity itself is declared a political act. These people often have a com pelling radical analysis of oppression, hard won and fiercely defended. This would include such divergent groups as vegahs, lesbian sepa ratists, and anarchist rewilders. They would all feel deeply insulted to be called liberals. But if the only solutions proposed encompass nothing larger than personal action-and indeed political resistance is rejected as '''participation'' in an oppressive system-then the program is ulti mately liberal, and doomed to fail, despite the clarity of the analysis and the dedication of its adherents. The defining characteristic of an oppositional culture, on the other Slide 121: Culture of Resistance 129 hand, is that it consciously claims to be the cradle of resistance. Where the alternative culture exists to create personal change, the oppositional culture exists to nurture a serious movement for political transforma tion of the institutions that control society. It understands that concrete systems of power have to be dismantled, and that such a project will require tremendous courage, commitment, risk, and potential loss of life. In the words of Andrea Dworkin, Now, when I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I'm not just talking about some thing that comes and something that goes. I 'm not talking about a feeling. I'm not talking about having in your heart the way things should be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart. I'm talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live. This does not mean just changing the men whom you know so that their manners will get better-although that wouldn't be bad either. . . . But that's not what a political resistance is. A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and where people can't. It is passed from generation to gen eration. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.27 As you can see there is a split to the root between the Romantics and the resistance, a split that's been present for centuries. They both start with a rejection of some part of the established social order, but they identify their enemy differently, and from that difference they head in opposite directions. Again, this difference often forms a continuum in many people's lived experience, as they move from yoga class to the f od co-op to a meeting about shutting down the local nuclear power o plant. But we need to understand the differences between the two poles ofthe continuum, even if the middle is often murky. Those differences have been obscured by two victories ofliberalism: the conflation of per- Slide 122: 130 Part I: Resistance sonal change with political change, and the broad rejection of real resistance. But a merely alternative culture is not a culture of resist ance, and we need clarity about how they are different. For the alternative culture-the inheritors of the Romantic move ment-the enemy is a constraining set of values and conventions, usually cast as bourgeois. Their solution is to "create an alternative world within Western society" based on "exaggerated individualism."�8 The Bohemians, for instance, were direct descendants of the Romantic movement. The Bohemian ethos has been defined by "transgression, excess, sexual outrage, eccentric behavior, outrageous appearance, nos talgia and poverty."29 They emphasized the artist as rebel, a concept that would have been incomprehensible in the premodern era when both artists and artisans had an accepted place in the social hierarchy. The industrial age upset that order, and the displaced artist was recast as a rebel. But this rebellion was organized around an internal feeling state. Stephen Spender wrote in his appropriately titled memoir World Within World, "I pitied the unemployed, deplored social injustice, wished for peace, and held socialist views. These views were emotional."30 Eliza beth Wilson correctly names Bohemia as "a retreat from politics. "3' She writes, " In 1838, Delphine de Girardin commented on the way in which the best-known writers and artists were free to spend their time at balls and dances because they had taken up a stance of 'internal migration.' They had turned their back on politics, a strategy similar to the 'internal exile' of East European dissidents after 1945. "32 The heroization of the individual, in whatever admixture of suffering and alienation, forms the basis of the Romantic hostility to the polit ical sphere. The other two tendencies follow in different trajectories from that individualism. First is a valuing of emotional intensity that rejects self-reflection, rationality, and investigati<1n. For instance, Rosseau wrote, " For us, to exist is to feel; and our sensibility is incon testably more important than reason. "33 Second is a belief that the polis, the political life of society, is yet another stultifying system for the romantic hero to reject: Romantics . . . rejected the possibility of effecting change through politics. The Romantics were skeptical about merely Slide 123: Culture of Resistance 131 organizational reform, about the effects of simply rearranging a society's institutions . . . . The Romantics revolted not in the name of equality or to effect economic change but to enable the development of the 'inner man.' In this sense, they were opposed to the bourgeoisie and the radicals. Bourgeois con ventions were rejected because they were shallow and artificial, and the radical's program of social and economic change was rejected because it did nothing to free the human spirit)4 The Beatniks were inheritors of this tradition. Their main project was to "reject . . . the conformity and materialism of the middle class," mostly through experimentation with drugs and sex, and to lay claim to both emotion and art as unmediated and transcendent» But the Beat niks were a small social phenomenon. They didn't blossom into the hippies until the demographics of both the baby boom and the middle class provided the necessary alienated youth in the 1960s. lSI lSI lSI The youth origin of the alternative culture is crucial to understanding it. As previously discussed, the Wandervogel was a youth movement. In fact, in 1911, "there were more Germans in their late teens than there would ever be again in the twentieth century."36 The seeds of that original youth culture were transplanted to the US, where they lay dormant until a sim ilar critical mass of young people reached adolescence. The alternative culture as we know it is largely a product of the adolescent brain. Because the brain of an adolescent is the same size as an adult brain, scientists once concluded that it was fully developed sometime around puberty. But with new technology like M RI and PET scans, we can lit erally see that the adolescent brain is very much "a work in progress."37 To begin with, the prefrontal cortex ( P FC) isn't utilized in an ado lescent brain to the extent that it will be in an adult brain. David Walsh, in his book on the adolescent brain, Why Do They Act That Way?, calls the PFC "the brain's conscience." According to Walsh, it is "responsible for planning ahead, considering consequences, and managing emo tional states. "38 As well, a person's ability to judge time is not fully Slide 124: 132 Part I: Resistance developed until age twenty-one. Adolescents literally cannot understand cause and effect or long-term consequences the way an adult can. The PFC is the "executive center of the brain. "39 When impulses fire from other areas of the brain, the PFC's job is to control them. But because this region is still under construction for adolescents, they lack impulse control. Delayed gratification is not exactly the gift of that age group, who are also routinely associated with rudeness, irresponsibility, . and laziness. All of this is a function of an underactive PFC. The "lazi ness" is compounded by a few other brain development processes. The ventral striatal circuit is responsible for motivation and it goes inactive during adolescence. As well, the adolescent brain undergoes a huge shift in sleep patterns. The amount of sleep and the timing of the sleep cycle are both affected. Much of the process is complicated and still under scrutiny. Fifty different neurotransmitters and hormones may be involved.40 Two things are certain: teens need more sleep, and they often can't fall asleep at night. Forced to conform to an industrial reg imentation of time, they're often dead tired during the day, a tiredness based on their biology, not their moral failings. Myelination is crucial to brain development. Myelin is a form of fat that protects and insulates our axons , which are the cablelike structures in the neurons. Myelination is the process whereby the neurons build up that protective fat. Without it, the electrical impulses are impeded in their travel along their axons-by a factor of a hundred. Unprotected axons are also Vulnerable to electrical interference from nearby axons. A generation ago, scientists thought that myelination was complete by age seven, but nothing could be further from the truth. The myelination process is not only incom plete for adolescents, in some areas of the brain it "increases by 10 0 percent. " 4 1 O n e of the areas responsible for emofional regulation undergoes myelination during adolescence, which, according to David Walsh, "accounts for the lightening quick flashes of anger" that are the hallmark of youthY Hormonal fluctuations are another factor that can create an ampli fication of emotional intensity, leading to the risk taking, impulsive behavior, anger, and overall emotionality of the teen years. Walsh is clear that while "it is not the teen's fault that his brain isn't Slide 125: Culture of Resistance 133 fully under his control. it's his responsibility to get it under his con trol."4J It's the role of parents and their stand-ins in the larger culture to provide the guidance, support, and structure to help young people toward adulthood. Without adults to supply expectations and conse quences, the developing brain will never connect the neurons that need to be permanently linked at this stage of life. This has been an impor tant task of functioning communities for thousands of years: to raise the next crop of adults. There is a window of opportunity for every period of development in the brain. Walsh reports that neurologists have a saying: the neu rons that fire together, wire together. This is true from infancy-where basic neurological patterns for functions like hearing and sight are laid down-on through adolescence, where our capacity for self-regulation, assessing consequences, and relational bonding are either cultivated into lifelong strengths or ignored to wither away. Beyond the biology of the teen brain is the psychology of adoles cence. Psychologist Erik Erikson says that the biggest task of those years is identity formation. It is the time when the question of Who I Am takes on an intensity and importance that will likely never be matched again. And thank goodness. I remember my relationship with my high school best friend. We would see each other before first period, at lunch, and for shared classes. When we got home, we'd talk on the phone immediately-having been separated for all of forty-five min utes, there were crucial things to say. Then after dinner, we'd have to talk again. The next morning, it started all over in the five minutes at her locker before homeroom. Looking back I wonder: what in the world were we talking about? But that's the project of adolescence, self-reve lation and exploration. It was all so new, so intense, so compelling. We talked about our feelings and then our feelings about our feelings and then our feelings about our . . . By the time I was twenty, it wasn't half so interesting. By the time I was thirty, it was boring. And past thirty five, you couldn't pay me enough to have those kinds of conversations. But this is where the counterculture-a product of adolescent biology and psychology-has been permanently stuck. The concerns of adolescence-its gifts and its shortcomings-are the framework for Slide 126: 134 Part I: Resistance the alternative culture, and these community norms and habits have become accepted across the left in what Theodore Roszak calls a "pro gressive 'adolescentization' of dissenting thought and culture. "44 Its main project is the self, its exploration, and its expression, to the point where many adherents are actively hostile to political engagement. One common version of this is a concession that some kind of social change is necessary, but that the only thing we can change is ourselves. Thus injustice becomes an excuse for narcissism. As one former activist .� explained to sociologist Keith Melville, " I had done the political trip for awhile, but I got to the point where I couldn't just advocate social change, I had to live it. Change isn't something up there, out there, and it isn't a power trip. It's in here," he thumped his chest, and little puffs of dust exploded from his coveralls. "This is where I have to start if I want to change the whole fucking system."45 Timothy Leary, the high priest of Psychedelia, continuously urged the youth movement to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." He believed that the activists and the "psychedelic religious movement" were "com pletely incompatible."46 John Lennon and John Hoyland debated the conflict between individual and social change in a public exchange of letters in 1968. Lennon argued by defending the lyrics to " Revolution." You say you'll change the constitution well, you know we all want to change your head. You tell me it's the institution, well, you know, you better free your mind instead. To which Hoyland replied, "What makes you so sure that a lot of us haven't changed our heads in something like the way you recom mend-and then found out it wasn't enough, because you simply cannot be turned on and happy when you know kids are being roasted to death in Vietnam?"47 Slide 127: Culture of Resistance 135 The endless project of the self is fine for people who are fifteen, as long as they are surrounded by a larger community of adults who can provide the structure for the physical and psychological developments that need to happen to produce a mature individual. But anyone past adolescence should be assuming her or his role as an adult: to provide for the young and the vulnerable, and to sustain and guide the com munity as a whole. For a culture of resistance, these jobs are done with the understanding that resistance is primary in whatever tasks our tal ents call us to undertake. We are never delinked from the larger goal of creating a movement to fight for justice. The legacy of the Romantics is especially prominent in the politics of emotion embraced by many different strands of the alternative culture. Emotions are understood as pure, unmediated by society, a society whose main offense is seen to be the suppression of these always authentic feelings. The paramount emotional state varies-for the hippies and New Agers, it's love; for the punks, it's rage; and for the Goths, it's exquisite suffering-but the ultimate goal is to achieve the selected emotion and maintain it. Emotional states are not always clearly defined as a goal in these subcultures , but these efforts are accepted as the unexamined norms. Under the influence of therapy and "personal growth" workshops, the expression of all emotions has achieved a status that approaches a human right. To tell someone you refuse to "process" or to suggest that a group stay focused on discussion and decision making is to provoke outrage. All appropriate sense of boundaries and discernment are con sidered not the hallmark of adults but conditioning that must be overcome. We must be willing and able to reveal the most intimate details of our personal histories with strangers, and the more intense and performative that sharing, the better. This individualist stance was taken up as politics across the coun terculture in the '60S. It found its zenith in Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. The title of Hoffman's book, Revolutionf the Hell o It, is just or f an update on " Our lack of purpose is our strength" and is about as useful for a political movement. Set aside the misogyny ( Hoffman molesting flight attendants) , homophobia ("the peace movement is f ags"), and the excruciating right-on racism. It's the self-centered idiocy Slide 128: 136 Part I: Resistance of this book that's unbearable. Yet it inspired a counterculture that still plagues the left today. It's also hard to critique this book knowing that Hoffman was bipolar and committed suicide. The mental illness shrieks from the page. The Diggers left after we had talked the whole night. The S D S 'ers slept all night very soundly. They had nothing to talk about in those wee morning hours when you rap on and on and a dialogue of non-verbal vibrations begins. You Relate! ! You Plan!! You Think! ! You Get Stoned!! You Feel! !48 You need lithium and a caring support system. The book is a scattershot of antiauthoritarian rants that claim intense emotion-usually brought on by staged drama-as the ultimate goal. Hoffman urged actions like this: Stand on a street corner with 500 leaflets and explode. . . . Recruit a person to read the leaflet aloud while all this distri bution is going on. Run around tearing the leaflets, selling them, trading them. Rip one in half and give half to one person and half to another and tell them to make love. Do it all fast. Like slapstick movies. Make sure everyone has a good time. People love to laugh-it's a riot. Riot-that's an interesting word-game if you want to play it.49 This self-conscious display stands in stark contrast to a serious resistance movement. Comparing this behavior to the courage, spiri tual depth, and personal dignity of Erich Miihsam o�e rank and file in the civil rights movement, it's hard not to cringe. The continuum between bipolar disorder and the adolescent brain is apparent in Hoffman: the lack of judgment, the runaway emotional intensity, the knee-jerk reaction against all constraint, the entitlement, even the sleeplessness, all tragically magnified by the manic states of his illness. A culture of youth without the guidance of adults will pro duce exactly what Hoffman envisioned. It will also be unable to Slide 129: Culture of Resistance 137 recognize frank mental illness when it's costumed by a radical stance, or to help the people consumed by such illness. That help can only come from a stable, committed community. I ronically, building and maintaining such a community requires that some people embody the values that Hoffman and the youth culture rejected out of hand: responsibility, commitment, respect. Beyond the personal tragedy lies the political tragedy that befell the left, as the drop-out culture diverted disaffected youth from building a serious resistance movement against real systems of oppression racism, capitalism, patriarchy-and a culture of resistance that could support that movement. Instead, with the enemy identified as "middle class hang-ups"-as anything that got in the way of any impulse-and liberation defined as an internal emotional state, the idealism and �ard won gains of the '60S collapsed into the "me" generation of the '70S.50 And now aU that's left is a vaguely liberal alterna-culture, identifiable by its meditation classes and under-cooked legumes, its obsession with its own psychology, and its New Age spiritual platitudes. Nothing bad will ever happen if you keep your mind, colon, and/or aura pure, which leaves believers in a very awkward position of having to blame the victim when disease, heartbreak, or smart bombs faU. This is in no way to erase those stalwart individuals who have never lost their commitment to a just world and continued to fight. It is to mourn with them a generational moment of promise that was squandered and has yet to come again. Radical groups have their own particular pitfalls. The first is in dealing with hierarchy, both conceptually and practically. The rejection of authority is another hallmark of adolescence, and this knee-jerk reac tivity filters into many political groups. All hierarchy is a tool of The Man, the patriarchy, the Nazis. This approach leads to an insistence on consensus at any cost and often a constant metadiscussion of group power dynamics. It also unleashes "critiques" of anyone who achieves public acclaim or leadership status. These critiques are usually nothing more than jealousy camouflaged by political righteousness. " Bourgeois" is a perennial favorite, as well as whatever flavor of "sell-out" matches Slide 130: 138 Part I: Resistance the group's criteria. It's often accompanied by a hyperanalysis of the victim's language use or personal lifestyle choices. There is a reason that the phrase "politically correct" was invented on the lefty There's a name for this trashing. As noted, Florynce Kennedy called it "horizontal hostility. "5' And if it feels like j unior high school by another name, that's because it is. It can reach a feeding frenzy of ugly gossip and character assassination. In more militant groups, it may take the form of paranoid accusations. In the worst instances of the groups that encourage macho posturing, it ends with men shooting each other. Ultimately, it's caused by fighting horizontally rather than vertically (see Figure 3-1, p. 85). If the only thing we can change is our selves or if the best tactics for social change are lifestyle choices, then, indeed, examining and critiquing the minutiae of people's personal people in power, the only people left to fight are each other. Writes Denise Thompson, Horizontal hostility can involve bullying into submission someone who is no more privileged in the hierarchy of male supremacist social relations than the bully herself It can involve attempts to destroy the good reputation of someone who has no more access to the upper levels of power than the one who is spreading the scandal. It can involve holding someone respon sible for one's own oppression, even though she too is oppressed. It can involve envious demands that another woman stop using her own abilities, because the success of someone no better placed than you yourself "makes" you feel inadequate and worth less. Or it can involve attempts to silence criticism by attacking the one perceived to be doing the criticising. In gen�ral terms, it involves rnisperceptions of the source of domination, locating it with women who are not behaving oppressively. 53 This behavior leaves friendships, activist circles, and movements in shreds. The people subject to attack are often traumatized until they permanently withdraw. The bystanders may find the culture so unpleasant and even abusive that they leave as well. And many of the lives will be cast as righteous activity. And if you're not going to fight the Slide 131: Culture of Resistance 139 worst aggressors burn out on their own adrenaline, to drop out of the movement and into mainstream lives. I n military conflicts, more sol diers may be killed by "friendly fire" than the enemy, an apt parallel to how radical groups often self-destruct. To be viable, a serious movement needs a supportive culture. It takes time to witness the same behaviors coalescing into the destructive pat terns that repeat across radical movements, to name them, and to learn to stop them. Successful cultures of resistance are able to develop healthy norms of behavior and corresponding processes to handle con flict. But a youth culture by definition doesn't have that cache of experience, and it never will. A culture of resistance also needs the ability to think long-term. One study of student activists from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement interviewed participants five years after their sit-in. Many of them felt that the movement-and hence political action-was unsuccessfuI.s4 Five years? Try five generations. Movements for serious social change take a long time. But a youth movement will be forever delinked from generations. Contrast the (mostly white) ex-protestors' attitude with the history of the Pullman porters, the black men who worked as sleeping car attendants on the railroad. The porters were both the generational and political link between slavery and the civil rights movement, accumu .lating income, self-respect, and the political experience they would need to wage the protracted struggle to end segregation. The very first Pullman porters were in fact formerly enslaved men. George Pullman hired them because they were people who, tragically, could act sub serviently enough to make the white passengers happy. (When Pullman tried hiring black college kids from the North for summer j obs as porters, the results were often disastrous.) Yet the j obs offered two things in exchange for the subservience: economic stability (despite the gruesomely long hours) and a broadening outlook. Writes historian Larry Tye: The importance of education was drilled into porters on the sleepers, where they got an up-close look at America's elite that few black men were afforded, helping demystifY the white race Slide 132: 140 Part I: Resistance at the same time it made its advantages seem even more unfair and enticing. That was why they worked so hard for tips, took on second jobs at home, and bore the indignities of the race conscious sleeping cars . . . . It was an accepted wisdom that they turned out more college graduates than anyone else. And those kids, whether or not they made lists of the most famous, grew up believing they could do anything. The result . . . was that Pullman porters helped give birth to the African-Amer ican professional classes.55 The porters knew that in their own lives they would only get so far. But their children were raised to carry the struggle forward. The list of black luminaries with Pullman porters in their families is impressive, from John O'Bryant ( San Francisco's first black mayor) to Florynce Kennedy to Justice Thurgood Marshall. Civil rights lawyer Elaine Jones, whose father worked as a porter to put his three kids through presti gious universities, has this to say: "All he expected in return was that we had a duty to succeed and give back. Dad said, ' I 'm doing this so they can change things. ' · He won through US." 56 One reason the civil rights struggle was successful was that there was a strong linkage between the generations, an unbroken line of determination, character, and courage, that kept the movement pushing onward as it accumulated political wisdom. The gift ofyouth is its idealism and courage. That courage may veer into the foolhardy due to the young brain's inability to foresee conse quences, but the courage of the young has been a prime force in social movements across history. For instance, Sylvia Pankhurst describes what happened when the suffragist Women's Social and Political Union (WS PU) embraced arson as a tactic: , In July 1912, secret arson began to be organized under the direction of Christabel Pankhurst. When the policy was fully under way, certain officials of the Union were given, as their main work, the task of advising incendiaries, and arranging for the supply of such inflammable material, house-breaking tools, and other matters as they might require. A certain exceedingly Slide 133: Culture of Resistance 141 feminine-looking young lady was strolling about London, meeting militants in all sorts of public and unexpected places to arrange for perilous expeditions. Women, most o them very f young, toiled through the night across unfamiliar country, car rying heavy cases of petrol and paraffin. Sometimes they failed, sometimes succeeded in setting fire to an untenanted building-all the better if it were the residence of a notability or a church, or other place of historic interest.57 (emphasis added) Add to this that they performed these activities-including scaling buildings, climbing hedges, and running from the police-while wearing corsets and encumbered by pounds of skirting. It's over whelmingly the young who are willing and able to undertake these kinds of physical risks. A great example of a working relationship between youth and elders is portrayed in the film Kanehsatake: 270 Years o Resistance.>8 The movie f documents the Oka crisis (mentioned in Chapter 6), in which Mohawk people protected their burial ground from being turned into a golf course. The conflict escalated as the defenders barricaded roads and the local police were replaced by the army. Alanis Obomsawin was behind the barricades, so her film is not a fictional replay, but actual ·footage of the events. Of note here is the number of times she captured the elders-with their fully functioning prefrontal cortexes-stepping between the youth and trouble, telling them to calm down and back away. Without the warriors, the blockade never would have happened; without the elders, it's likely there would have been a massacre. Youth's moral fervor and intolerance of hypocrisy often results in either/or thinking and drawing too many lines in the sand, but serious movements need the steady supply of idealism that the young provide. The psychological task of middle age is to remember that idealism helps protect against the rough wear of disappointment. Adulthood also brings responsibilities that the young can't always understand. Having children, for instance, will put serious constraints on activism. Aging parents who need care and support cannot be abandoned. And then there's the activist's own basic survival needs, the demands of shelter, Slide 134: 142 Part I: Resistance food, health care. The older people need the young to bring idealism and courage to the movement. The women's suffrage movement started with a generation of women who asked nicely. In an age when women had no right to ask for anything, they did the best they could. The struggle, like that of the Pullman porters and the succeeding civil rights movement, was handed down to the next generation. Emmeline Pankhurst recalls a childhood of fund raisers to help newly freed blacks in the U S , attending her first women's suffrage meeting at age fourteen, and bedtime stories from Uncle Tom's Cabin. She wrote, Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their time . . . . Young as I was-I could not have been older than five years-I knew perfectly well the meaning of the words "slavery" and "emancipation. "59 Emmeline married Dr. Richard Pankhurst, who drafted the first women's suffrage bill and the Married Women's Property Act, which, when it passed in 1882, gave women control over their own wages and property. Up until then, women did not even own the clothes on their backs-men did. (The next time you buy your own shirt with your own money, remember to thank all Pankhursts great and small.) Emmeline and Richard's daughters, Sylvia and Christabel, were the third genera tion of Pankhursts born to be activists. It was in large part the infusion of their youthful idealism and courage that fueled the battle for women's suffrage. Emmeline wrote, All their lives they had been interested in women's suffrage. Christabel and Sylvia, as little girls, had cried to be taken to meetings. They had helped in our drawing-room meetings in every way that children can help. As they grew older we used to talk together about the suffrage, and I was sometimes rather frightened by their youthful confidence in the prospect, which they considered certain, of the success of the movement. One Slide 135: Culture of Resistance 143 day Christabel startled me with the remark: "How long you women have been trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it." Was there, I reflected, any difference between trying for the vote and getting it? There is an old French proverb, "If youth could know; if age could do." It occurred to me that if the older suffrage workers could in some way join hands with the young, unwearied, and resourceful suffragists, the movement might wake up to new life and new possibilities. After that I and my daughters together sought a way to bring about that union of young and old which would find new methods, blaze new trails.60 Emmeline raised her girls in a serious culture of resistance. As a strategist, she wisely understood that the moment was ripe for the young to push the movement on to new tactics. Thus was formed the WSPU. "We resolved to . . . be satisfied with nothing but action on our question. ' Deeds, not Words' was to be our permanent motto."61 Those deeds would run to harassing government officials, civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and arson. They would also be successful. The transition from one generation to the next, and an increase in confrontational tactics, is rarely smooth. The older activists may try to obstruct the young. It often splits movements. When the W S P U embraced more militance, women who had been crucial to its founding had to leave the organization. Wrote Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Mrs. Pankhurst met us with the announcement that she and Christabel had determined on a new kind of campaign. Hence f orward she said there was to be a widespread attack upon public and private property, secretly carried out by Suffragettes who would not offer themselves for arrest, but wherever possible would make good their escape. As our minds had been moving in quite another direction, this project came as a shock to us both. We considered it sheer madness . . . Although we had been at one with Mrs. Pankhurst in her objective ofwomen's political emancipation, and for six years had pursued the same path, Slide 136: 144 Part I: Resistance there had always been an underlying difference between us that had not come into the open, mainly because of the close union of mind and purpose . . . we found ourselves for the first time in something that resembled a family quarre1.62 These are painful moments inside organizations and across move ments. But it is more or less inevitable. The overall pattern is one we should be aware of so we can work with it rather than struggling against it. This transition is likely to be linked with the ethical issues around nonviolence. As with those disagreements, we have to find a way to build a serious movement despite our differences. Building radical movements has been harder since the creation of a youth culture. Breaking the natural bonds (could there be a deeper bond than the cross generational one between mother and child?) between young and old means that the political wisdom never accu mulates. It also means that the young are never socialized into a true culture of resistance. The values of a youth culture-an adolescent stance rejecting all constraints-prevent both the "culture" and the "resistance" from really developing. No culture can exist without com munity norms based on responsibility to each other and some accepted ways to enforce those norms. And the "resistance" will never amount to more than a few smashed windows, the low-hanging tactical fruit for an adolescent strategy of emotional intensity. Currently there are young people emboldened by a desperate fear lessness, ready to take up militance. I get notes from them all the time; each one both revives and drains my hope. Because, though they bum for action, they have no guidance and no support. This is the deep irony of history: the countercultures of the Romantics, the Wandervogel, the I hippies-created by youth-have stranded our young. While the alternative culture "celebrates political disengagement," what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Slide 137: Culture of Resistance 145 Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it's also a liberal one. This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell's Angels, one primary "freedom" they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys-some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought-was declared "the freest spirit that has yet existed" by Guil laume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.G) Women's physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent-and appalling-than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography. The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart pro duces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolu tion, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog f armers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hier archy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere. Slide 138: 146 Part I: Resistance The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Tho�e people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pen nies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances. And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or "focusing on the worst," as feminists are often accused of doing. " Double-anal" is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it-not mastur bating to it, but actually looking at it-you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is "what the end of the world looks like." By that I don't mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don't have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornog raphy, we get a glimpse-in a very visceral, powerful which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like ifwe don't reverse the pathological course that we ate on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society. . . . Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity-the things that make decent human society possible-are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic fashion-of the consequences of the oppressive systems in Slide 139: Culture of Resistance 147 shapes most relationships and interaction . . . . [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornog raphy and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so nor malized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male popula tion of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?64 All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that's men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of child hood sexual abuse is called " Dad." Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a "barricade of sexual ter rorism"65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroti cize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down. In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony. Gail Dines writes , "When I critique M cDonalds, no one calls me anti-food."66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations-with economic, political, and ideological com ponents-that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. Slide 140: 148 Part I: Resistance The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $roo billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cru elty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm? And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as "natural." Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hier archy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want. On a global scale, the naked female body-too thin to bear live young and often too young as well-is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale ofwomen.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can't decide? We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation. This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It's a slight variation on the Romantics, sub stituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediat�d, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of "transgression, excess, sexual outrage." Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as " Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautreamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire" as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, "Two centuries ahead of Slide 141: Culture of Resistance 149 time . . . Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom. "70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche's will to power. His ethic ultimately provides "the erotic roots of fascism."71 Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it's time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear-and, finally, know-this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: "Without tenderness, we are in hell."7l The alternative culture of the '60S offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and fol lowing out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atom ized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism's fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future. Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right's "family values." It's no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it's also a mis take. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Under neath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to cel ebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. " If it feels good, do it" isn't even the province of adolescence; it's the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version-Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus-pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys-intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos-are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a real- Slide 142: 150 Part I: Resistance ization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfac tion: from the contented j oy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery. Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long values in our lives and our movements-the right will be partially cor rect. They will also have recruitment potential that we're squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated. It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the U S cul ture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn't Sodom or Gomorrah, it's corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance. The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Repub licans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization. s s s as the left refuses to fight for our values as values-and to enact those We can begin by picking up the pieces of community and civic life in the u s . People of my parent's generation are correct to mourn the loss of the community trust and participation that they once experienced. And as Robert Putnam makes clear in his book on the subject, Bowling Alone, social trust is linked to both civic and political participation in ways that are mutually reinforcing-or mutually reducing. My mother and her friends have the addresses of their state and federal congress- Slide 143: Culture of Resistance 151 people memorized. Twenty years behind them, I at least know their names. And the current college-aged generation? They explain earnestly how the government works: "The President tells Congress what to do, and Congress tells the Supreme Court what to do." In two generations, there goes every advance since Magna Carta. We're getting stupider, crueler, and more depressed by the minute. Oliver James calls the values of the corporate media "Affiuenza," likening it to a virus that spreads across societies. He points out that anxiety, depression, and addiction rise in direct proportion to the inequity in a country. The values required to institutionalize inequality are values that are destructive to human happiness and human com munity. Injustice requires reducing people-including ourselves-to "manipulable commodities."74 James writes, " Intimacy is destroyed if you regard another person as an object to be manipulated to serve your ends, whether at work or at play. . . . This leaves you feeling lonely and craving emotional contact, vulnerable to depression. "75 How did this happen? When did people stop caring? One insight of Marxist cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci is that in order for oppression to function smoothly, ideology must be transferred from the oppressors to the oppressed. They can't stand over us all with guns twenty-four hours a day. This transfer must be consensual and actively embraced to work on a society-wide scale. If the dominant class can make the ideology pleasurable, so much the better. Nothing could have done the job better than the passivity-inducing, addictive, and isolating technologies of first television and then the Internet. Corporations have managed to coerce a huge percentage of the pop ulation into abandoning the values and behaviors that make people happy-to act against our own interests by instilling in us a new mythos and a set of compulsive behaviors. There is no question that television and other mass media are addictive, leading to "habituation, desensitization, satiation, and an increasing level of arousal . . . required to maintain satisfaction. "76 Clearly, there is an intense short term pleasure capturing people, because the long-term losses are tremendous. Literally thousands of studies have documented televi sion's damage to children; indeed, a coalition of professional groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Slide 144: 152 Part I: Resistance Academy of Pediatrics, put out a joint report in 2000 declaring media violence a serious public health issue to children, with effects that are "measurable and long-lasting."77 The American Academy of Pediatrics reports, " Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, night mares, and fear of being harmed."78 The most chilling studies link television to teen depression, eating disorders, and suicide. I f the destruction of our young isn't enough to get us to fight back, what will be? As a culture, we are actively handing over the young to be social ized by corporate America in a set of values that are essentially amoral. The average child will spend 2,000 hours with her parents and 40,000 hours with the mass media. Why even bother to have children? If culture is a set of stories we collectively tell, the stories have now been reduced to the sound bites of profit, offered up in a tantalizing, addictive flash that barricades access to our selves, if not our souls. Writes· Maggie Jackson, "The way we live is eroding our capacity f deep, sus or tained, perceptive attention-the building blocks of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress."79 For the young, those barricades may be perma nent. Children need to experience bonding or they will end up with personality disorders, living as narcissists, borderlines, and sociopaths. They m.ust learn basic values like compassion, generosity, and duty to become functioning members of society. They must have brains that can learn, contemplate, and question in order to have both a rich internal life and to have something to offer as participants in a democracy. For the developing child, bonding, values, and expectations create neurologic pat filled. The brain gets one opportunity to build itself, and only one. The job of a parent is to socialize the young. Until recently, parentS ' and children were nestled inside a larger social syst�m with the same. basic values taught at home. Now, parents are being told to "protect"': their kids from the culture at large-a task that cannot be done. is where we all live, unless you want to move to Antarctica. Even if you., 1 terns that last a lifetime. Their absence leaves voids that can never be Society] managed to keep the worst excesses of consumerist, violent, and rnisog j ynist elements out of your child's immediate environment, the childl still has to leave the house. If the culture is so toxic that we can't en our children to it, we need to change the culture. truSt.l 1 ,j i Slide 145: Culture of Resistance 153 The values taught by the mass media encourage the worst in human beings. If people are objects, neither intimacy nor community are pos sible. If image is all we are, we will always need to be on display. Social invisibility is a kind of death to social creatures. We buy more and more, whether higher-status cars or lower-cut jeans, so that we can have a better shot at being noticed as the object du jour. People surrounded by a culture of mass images experience themselves and the world as deper sonalized, distant, and fractured. This is the psychological profile of PTS D. Add to that the sexual objectification and degradation of those images, and you have girls presenting with PTSD symptoms with no history of abuse.8o The culture itselfhas become the perpetrator. Yes, we can try to inoculate ourselves and our children against the mass media, both its messages and its processes. But why should anyone need to be protected from the culture in which they live? And what good are all your heartfelt conversations and empowering femi nist fairy tales when your girl child is surrounded by people who are not fans of Gaia Girls, but Girls Gone Wild? As Pat Murphy bravely writes, Suggesting that media is in general harmful and should be eliminated (or a dramatic reduction in the time spent imbibing it) at first seems absurd. But it is no more absurd than sug gesting the age of oil and other fossil fuels is over. Media, energy and corporate control have evolved together. We need different concepts and new world views to transition away from fossil fuels and its infrastructure of corporations (including those of the media).8t Again, the right does not have a monopoly on values. We can reject authoritarianism, conformity, social hierarchy, anti-intellectualism, and religious fundamentalism. We can defend equality, justice, compas sion, intellectual engagement, civic responsibility, and even love against the corporate jihad. We have to. Slide 146: 154 Part I: Resistance Past movements for social justice insisted on character in their recruits. in honor, loyalty. and integrity. The culture of resistance created by the Spanish Anarchists valued ethical personal behavior. Writes Murray Bookchin, "They were working men and women, obrera consciente, who abjured smoking and drinking, avoided brothels and the bloody bull ring, purged their talk of 'foul' language. and by their probity, dignity. respect for knowledge, and militancy, tried to set a moral example for their entire class. "82 We could do worse. The right will continue to suc cessfully blame the left for the destruction of culture and community as long as the left can't or won't stand firmly in defense of our values. This is probably the right time to defend the concept of a work ethic. The alternative culture of the '60S was in part a reaction against the conformity of the '50S and its obedience to authority. In 1 9 5 9 , my mother and her friends decided to start an underground newspaper at . their school. Their first step? Asking permission from the principal. He said no. They dropped the idea. No wonder the '60S happened. The alternative culture was based on the premise that essentially nobody had to do anything they didn't feel like doing. A major part of their rebellion was the rejection of a work ethic, always cast as Protes tant. But taken to its logical end, this is the position of a parasite. The dropouts either got money from their parents, from friends who got it from parents, or from the state. Eventually, each life has to be supported with resources from somewhere. I have seen a few too many protests and alternative communities surviving on the Mooch Ethic. I have sat · on couches that housed rats, eaten off dishes that gave me gastroen teritis, and learned (secondhand, thankfully) that an itchy butt at sundown means pinworms. I 've watched incredible resources go to , waste-houses fall to ruin, land repossessed-for refusal to do basic adult tasks like paying the taxes. I don't know whicH is worse: the gen-:· eral ethos's entitlement, or the stupidity; the smell of the outhouses. the unwashed bodies, or the marijuana. J l The rebellion against a work ethic is another characteristic of youth : culture. The ventral striatal circuit, which is the seat of motivation in.j the human brain, doesn't function well during adolescence, which ' . 1 why teens are often accused of being lazy. This means that the norms of youth culture will gravitate toward structureless days with no expec- Slide 147: Culture of Resistance 155 tations or goals. It also means that the youth culture and marijuana aren't a good match. The war on drugs is appalling. It has a corrosive effect on commu nities of color especially and has also made it difficult for those with legitimate need to get pain relief from drugs like marijuana.83 Medical cannabis is a legitimate treatment for a number of conditions, some of which, like autoimmune disorders, are life-threatening. People who need it should be able to get it, and society as a whole would probably be better off if cannabis was legalized. But drugs and alcohol have been a terrible detriment to both activist cultures and oppressed communities. I have watched people that I love erode with addiction, a slow death I'm powerless to stop. I am very sym pathetic to the straight-edge punks. It was obvious to me at age fourteen that there were two weapons I would need for the fight: a mind that could think and the heart of a warrior. Drugs would destroy the one and numb the other. I swore away from drugs and I 've never regretted that decision. Drug and alcohol addiction has had terrible effects on both oppressed communities and cultures of resistance. Such effects are broad and deep: the self-absorption, lack of motivation, and broken synapses create a population in semipermanent "couch lock." Drugs and alcohol will not help us when we need commitment, hard work, and sacrifice, which are the foundation of all cultures of resistance. Addicts have no place on the front lines of resistance because an addict will always put their addiction first. Always. I came of age in a post-Stonewall lesbian community that recognized the role that alcohol had played in destroying gay and lesbian lives. Our events specifically avoided bars as venues, and were often labeled "chern-free. " These were and are acts of communal self-care that were linked to survival and resistance. It was an important ethic, and it was understood and embraced. There are parallel calls for a chern-free ethic in some Native American activist groups, and for the same reason: drugs and alcohol have been damaging enough to name them geno cidal. The radical left would do well to model itself on these recent examples and to consider an ethic of sobriety as both collective self-care and resistance. We need everyone's brain. If our goal is a serious move- Slide 148: 156 Part I: Resistance ment, then we also need focus , dependability, and commitment. On the front lines, we need to kriow our comrades are rock solid. In our culture, we need a set of ethics and behavioral norms that can build a functioning community. Basic awareness of addiction-its symptoms, its treatment options-is important both to help the afflicted and to keep our groups safe and strong. A related issue is the general lassitude caused by poor nutrition exac erbated by vegetarian and vegan diets. One investigator of alternative communities writes, " . . . for many of the rural groups, common activity is limited to part-time farming. In their permissive climate, there is often a debilitating, low-thyroid do-nothingness that looks like nothing so much as the reverse image of the compulsive busyness of their parents."84 The diet that holds sway across the left will produce that state exactly. A food ethic stripped of protein and fat may meet ideological needs, but it will not meet the biological needs of the human template. Our neu rotransmitters-the brain chemicals that make us happy and calm-are made from amino acids; amino acids are protein. Serotonin, for instance, is produced from the amino acid tryptophan. We cannot pro duce tryptophan; we can only eat it. Likewise endorphins and catecholamines. We must eat protein to have brains that work. We need fat, too, and you'll notice that in nature, protein and fat come packaged together. In order for your neurotransmitters to actually transmit, dietary fat is crucial. This is why people on low-fat diets are twice as likely to suffer from depression or die from suicide or violent death. If you need more reason to eat real food, your sex hormones are all made from dietary cholesterol: please eat some. A steady diet of carbohydrates , on the other hand, will produce depressed, anxious, irritable people too exhausted to do much beyond attend to the psychodnlmas created by their blood sugar swings, which about sums up the emotional ambiance of my youth. And the author's inclusion of "low-thyroid" in his descrip tion is right on the mark. Soy is often the only acceptable protein on the menu. Besides its poor quality-plant protein comes wrapped in cellu lose, which humans cannot digest-soy is a known goitrogen. In large enough quantities, like when eaten not as a condiment but as a protein source, it can suppress and even destroy the thyroid. Slide 149: Culture of Resistance 157 I 've been to a few too many potlucks with brown rice, dumpster dived mangoes, and the ubiquitous chips and hummus. I feel my grandmother's horror from the grave: why are we feeding each other poverty food? This is the only time I feel sorry for men, watching them repeatedly-and I mean four and five times-approach my pot of (pas ture-raised) beef-and-Ieek chili for more. They're desperate. They may be getting enough bulk calories every day, but they're starving. Men tend to crave protein because their protein needs are higher-testos terone means men have more muscle than women, and muscle is built from protein. Women tend to crave fat because our bodies are designed to store fat for pregnancy and lactation.85 The current anorexic beauty standards , besides being a very effective tool of patriarchy and capi talism, also point to a profound death wish embedded in this culture. Humans have been celebrating female fat-a veneration both aesthetic and spiritual-since we created art and religion. Our first two art proj ects reverenced the lives that made ours possible: the large ruminants we ate and the large women who birthed us. We must stop · hating the animals that we are. Only ideological fanatics (I was the most extreme version-vegan-for almost twenty years, so I 'm allowed to say that) will be able to stick to such body-pun ishing fare for any length of time. Everyone else will "cheat" and feel guilty over moral or even spiritual failings without understanding why they failed. The answer is simple: we have paleolithic bodies, we need paleolithic food. If you're fighting evolution, you are not going to win. There is a reason you feel hungry without fat and protein, a reason for the exhaustion that aches in your muscles and surrounds you like fog, a reason for the gray weight of depression. A plant-based diet is not ade quate for long-term maintenance and repair of the human brain or body, and it has been taking a heavy toll on the left for several generations. The final difference between the alternative culture and a culture of resis tance is the issue of spirituality. Remember that the Romantic Movement, arising as it did in opposition to industrialization, upheld Nature as an ideal and mourned a lost "state of nature" for humans. Slide 150: 158 Part I: Resistance Emotions were privileged as unmediated and authentic. Nonindustri alized peoples were cast as living in that pure state of nature. The Wandervogel idealized medieval peasants, developing a penchant for tunics, folk music, and castles. Writes Keith Melville, Predictably, this attraction to the peasantry never developed into a firm alliance. For all their vague notions of solidarity with the folk, the German youths did not remain for long among the peasants, nor did they take up political issues on their behalf. What the peasants provided was both an example and a symbol which sharpened the German Youth Movement's dissent against the mainstream society, against modernity, the industrialized city, and "progress. "86 When the subculture was transplanted to the U S , there were no peasants on which the new Nature Boys could model themselves. Peasant blouses and folkwear patterns found a role, but the real exploitation was saved for Native Americans and African Americans. Primitivism, an offshoot of Romanticism, constructs an image of indigenous people as timeless and ahistoric. As I discussed in the beginning of the chapter, this stance denies the indigenous their humanity by ignoring that they, too, make culture. Primitivism sees the indigenous as childlike, sexually unfettered, and at one with the natural world. The indigenous could be either naturally peaceful or uninhibited in their violence, depending on the proclivities of the white viewer. Hence, Jack Kerouac could write: At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver col�red section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough music, not enough night.87 He'd rather be black? Really? Would he rather have a better chance of going to jail than going to college? Would he rather have only one